American Jews Reject Zionism’s anti-Semitic Christian Friends

“the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends... our allies.” Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, M Lowenthall, pp. 83-84

Once again the Zionists are up to their old tricks. Consorting with anti-Semites to ‘encourage’ Jews to go to Israel. As Israel’s Ambassador in Britain once said, Zionism is a movement of ‘self-repatriation’.

But it is comforting to know that despite the best endeavours of the Zionist movement, most American Jews want nothing to do with the Christian Right and Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel. And Hagee is nothing if not a convinced and dedicated anti-Semite.

Hagee has blamed the Holocaust on Jews themselves and described the holocaust as a “divine plan” to drive Jews to Israel. He calls liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind.” and admits that that a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran that he favors will lead to the deaths of most Jews in Israel.

In Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee claims that Hitler was born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.” Apparently “it was Esau's descendants who produced the half-breed Jews of history who have persecuted and murdered the Jews beyond human comprehension ... Adolf Hitler was a distant descendant of Esau." and

"It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day... Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of antisemitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come.... it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people."[48]

Hagee's interpretation of Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust is effectively an endorsement of the holocaust as god's divine will. Hagee interprets Jeremiah 16:16 references to “fishers” and “hunters” as proof that Hitler was sent by god to drive the Jews to Israel. Nazism is therefore justified. Watch the video to see the mind boggling ignorance of a man who says Hitler tried to drive the Jews to Israel after the Holocaust! There wasn't even an Israel in existence then. Everyone referred to Palestine because that was the name of the Mandate but Hagee has difficulty acknowledging the Palestinians and is loathe to even mention the word. Effectively the Holocaust was god’s will because most Jews had ignored the ‘return’ to Palestine.

In another sermon, Hagee blamed American economic problems on the fact that the Federal Reserve System is controlled by "a group of Class A stockholders, including the Rothschilds." In the same series, Hagee further asserted that the Rothschilds, who are Jewish, were part of a wide-ranging conspiracy of "international power brokers based in Europe." Sound familiar?

But if American Jews largely dissociate themselves from Hagee, not so when it comes to the Zionists, who just love him. When Hagee was in Israel in 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu found time to meet him and his fellows. At the annual conference of CUFI in 2008 no less than the Israeli Ambassador was in attendance, as well as Joe Lieberman, the Bush Democrat and assorted Zionist flunkeys.

In April 11 2008 the Zionist Organisation of America issued a press release headed ‘ZOA Criticizes Reform's Yoffie for Anti-Hagee Remarks’ in which it attacked Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union of Reform Judaism, for stating that American Jews should reject any alliance or co-operation with Hagee. The Zionists were having none of this. Sure Hagee is an anti-Semite, but so what? Zionists have traditionally co-operated with all manner of anti-Semites, including Nazis. Why reject John Hagee? Their statement ran:

‘The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly praised Pastor Rev. John Hagee, the Evangelical Christian leader and head of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), following attacks upon him by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ). Rabbi Yoffie argued that American Jews should reject an alliance with Rev. Hagee and his organization, which is strongly supportive of Israel, because of Hagee's views on various issues,… In a speech to URJ on April 2, Rabbi Yoffie said that "No, we cannot cooperate with the Christian Zionists" because "What they mean by support of Israel and what we mean by support of Israel are two very different things."

I addressed a packed anti-fascist meeting at Sussex University last night. People found it strange initially that the English Defence League, a British fascist organisation that is anti-Semitic, nonetheless demonstrates in support of Israel and waves their flag. But of course it isn’t strange. If you don’t want Jews to live in Britain then it is logical to want them to go to for example Israel.

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward shows that American Jews, most of whom are not considered ‘real’ Jews by the Israeli State’s rabbis, who control all personal affairs (because they are Reform or Conservative) reject an alliance with Hagee & co. When it comes to a conflict between their own interests and that of Israel, more and more Jews reject Israel and Zionism.

Jews Cast Wary Eye on Evangelicals

Poll Finds Suspicion of Christian Right, Even Israel Supporters

By Nathan Guttman April 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — Advocates for improved relations between Jews and Christian evangelicals had hoped that years of working together to support Israel would build bridges between the two otherwise distant communities. But a new poll indicates that mistrust and suspicion still run deep, at least on the Jewish side.

Only one in five Jewish Americans holds favorable views of those aligned with the Christian right, a category that includes most of Israel’s evangelical supporters.

“I find this shocking and concerning,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the first major group to engage evangelical Christians in support of Israel. Eckstein and other activists working on Jewish-evangelical relations expressed a sense of betrayal, accusing Jewish liberals of being prejudiced against Christian conservatives and of clinging to pre-conceived notions and stereotypes about evangelicals’ beliefs and goals.

The survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and published April 3, asked Jewish respondents to rate the favorability of several religious groups. Mormons received a 47% favorability rating, Muslims 41.4%; the group described as “Christian Right” was viewed in favorable terms by only 20.9% of Jewish Americans. In contrast, the general American population, as shown by other polling data, views evangelicals more favorably than Muslims and Mormons.

“Most liberal Jews view the Christian right as wanting to impose a Christian America on them,” said Marshall Breger, professor at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law and leading voice on inter-religious relations. “To the extent to which the bulk of Jews are liberal, both politically and culturally, they’ll have negative views of the Christian right.”

Social views of Christian conservatives have been drawing attention in recent months as an increasingly significant part of the Republican presidential primary discourse. Attempts by GOP candidates to prove their conservative credentials in order to win over the Christian right have had, experts believe, an adverse effect on the Jewish community, turning it away from the Republican Party.

“It’s a huge factor in preventing Jews from becoming more attracted to Republican candidates,” said Kenneth Wald, distinguished professor of political science at the University of Florida and a leading expert on the intersection of religion and politics. He explained that the prominent role played by Christian conservatives in Republican politics is the major obstacle facing the party as it tries to win over Jewish voters.

Nonetheless, some have noticed a greater acceptance in the Jewish community. Eckstein said that in more than three decades of work on strengthening partnerships between the communities, he has seen Jewish opinion shift gradually to a more tolerant view of Christian evangelicals. “In the early years, the Christian right was very, very suspect in the eyes of the Jewish community,” he said.

Over time, the organized Jewish community began to warm up to evangelicals — in part, he believes, because of his group’s financial support to Jewish organizations. “When we started giving to the Jewish Agency [for Israel] and the [American Jewish] Joint [Distribution Committee], the Jewish community’s attitude began to change,” Eckstein said in a telephone interview from Israel.

Eckstein recalled being chastised for bringing televangelist Jerry Falwell to his synagogue 32 years ago, but later he officially represented the State of Israel at Falwell’s 2007 funeral. “Evangelicals went from being a pariah to becoming accepted,” he said.

This acceptance, however, has not penetrated the liberal Jewish circles or the broader Jewish community, all of which still view friendship to Israel as second in importance to shared social values. “There is a small segment of the Jewish population that loves evangelicals because evangelicals love Israel,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington religious affairs think tank. These Jews focus on the issue of Israel while not “buying into” other values promoted by Christian evangelicals, Cromartie said.

All research points to the sharp contrast between Jews and Christian conservative views on abortions, women rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the separation of religion and state as the key factor distancing the two communities. But David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, America’s largest evangelical pro-Israel organization, sees these issues as an excuse.

“On the social issues, there is more-or-less unanimity between Christian Conservatives, Mormons, Muslims and Orthodox Jews,” Brog argued. But it is only the Christian conservatives who are treated with mistrust by Jews — a situation caused, Brog posited, by Jewish concerns over evangelical proselytizing or adherence to the belief that the Christian faith should replace Judaism. “We in the Jewish community need to stop viewing the present through the lens of the traumatic past,” he said.

While praising Jewish organizations and federations for welcoming Christian evangelicals, Brog pointed to the Reform movement as leading the opposing views. Eckstein spoke generally about liberal Jews who “are concerned about tikkun olam [repairing the world]” more than about Israel, as those who still refuse to trust evangelicals as partners.

In response, Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, said that it is not the Christian right’s beliefs on social issues that pose a problem to the Jewish community — it is their attempt to bring those beliefs to the public sphere.

“The Christian right has a clear agenda for America that it is trying to advance in all levels of American politics, and this has to do with fundamental questions of our existence, such as church and state separation,” Saperstein said. In contrast, Catholics, Mormons and Muslims, as well as Orthodox Jews, have not taken their conservative beliefs beyond their own communities.

Saperstein sees initial seeds of cooperation between Jews and evangelical Christians on issues such as global warming and the fight against sex trafficking. Cooperation on these matters, he said, has helped build trust. Saperstein, however, warned that the current political focus of Christian conservatives on social issues, including abortions and civil liberties, “makes it very difficult to change the filters through which the Jewish community looks at them.”

Gilbert Achcar’s Arabs and the Holocaust

What was the attitude and record of Arabs and Muslims to the Holocaust?

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a review essay on Gilbert Achchar’s The Arabs & the Holocaust. It was published in Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal Vol.10, No.1 (May 2011): 109-119. It is one of the conditions of having an article published in a journal such as JHLS that you cannot reprint the article for at least 6 months after publication. Hence the long delay. It is the only critical review of the book that I have located, though I’m sure there are some others, but they have been given little prominence.

JHLS is edited by Professor Nur Masalha, a distinguished Palestinian historian of St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill whose books include The Bible & Zionism. Today St. Mary’s is part of the University of Surrey but back then it was an affiliated college of London University.

In 1980/81 I was a teacher education student at St. Mary’s, having been blacklisted by Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Sussex, as befits someone who was a student agitator and troublemaker. I was interviewed by the late Father Michael Prior, a bluff Irishman with a heart of gold. I was the only Jewish student in what was quite a conservative and sleepy college although my PGCE course was a nest of reds! Michael Prior went on to form Living Stones, a Christian solidarity group with Palestinian Christians, although I knew nothing of this at the time. But Michael clearly liked dissidents, probably because of his own Irish background. At that time the hunger strikes in Ireland were taking off (yes the Palestinian resistance closely mirrors that of Ireland).

Duncan McPherson was another unusual character who I quickly met. He was both a priest and President of the local Trades Council and a strong supporter of the Palestinians. A liberation theologist he ran the debating society. I can remember returning to the college to take part in a debate on 1 or 2 states with none other than George Galloway, who at that time supported a 2 states solution and was very much part of the Scottish Labour establishment.

Although I say it myself, the review is almost prophetic when analysing the political weaknesses of Achcar. Those weaknesses were, first and foremost, illusions in imperialism and Achcar's lack of any rigorous understanding still less critical analysis of Zionism. This was borne out by Achcar’s support for Western imperialism’s bombing campaign in Libya. Although motivated by humanitarian concerns re the Ghadaffi threat to the city of Benghazi, it betrayed his illusions that imperialism was capable of intervening to prevent a humanitarian disaster rather than securing control of Libya’s oil. The same forces are playing themselves out today in Syria. Yes we support the Syrian people but it is precisely because of that that we reject imperialist attempts to use the Syrian peoples’ struggles for their own, completely different, ends.

Tony Greenstein

Journal of Holy Land Studies 10.1 (2011): 109–119
DOI: 10.3366/hls.2011.0007 © Edinburgh University Press
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2011.0007

THE ARABS AND THE HOLOCAUST

Tony Greenstein

Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (London: Saqi Books, 2010). 237 pp. Hardback. ISBN: 9780863566394

Both the history of the Holocaust and its interpretation have been colonised by Israel and the Zionist movement. Its conclusions: that non- Jews who helped Jews were the exception, the ‘righteous among the nations’, and that Israel is a guarantee against its recurrence, have become commonplace. It is taken for granted that the Arabs, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, overwhelmingly supported Hitler. Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust is long overdue. It is based on a considerable body of research into the impact of the Holocaust on the Arabs during the Nazi era. Achcar is a Middle East and Arabic specialist, however his expertise does not extend to either Zionism or imperial history more generally. It is unfortunate that the book does not include the Arabs of the Maghreb.

The research of Robert Satloff, of the Israeli lobby’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is only mentioned in passing (pp. 101–102; and Satloff 2006: 99). At the premiere of the documentary ‘Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands’, Satloff remarked that he found it ‘inexplicable’ and that it smacked of ‘double standards’ that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, had rejected one particular man, Khaled Abdul Wahab, as one of the ‘righteous amongst the nations’.1 The research uncovered a number of Arabs such as Si Ali Sakat, who had sheltered 60 escapees who, in the Spring of 1943, had fled from a concentration camp near Tunisia’s Djebel Zaghouan mountains after the camp had come under attack.2

The Holocaust has become a propaganda instrument, a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ (Segev 1994: 11). This dates back to the Eichmann Trial in 1961, which was intended to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial. . . ’ of 1953–1958 (Segev 1994: 328), when survivors of the Hungarian holocaust accused the leadership of Hungarian Zionism and the Jewish Agency of collaboration in the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz. Achcar does not even mention the Kasztner Trial as he treads warily around Zionism’s record during the Holocaust. However Zionism’s record during the Holocaust and its behaviour towards the Palestinians are part of a seamless tapestry.

Achcar’s work is particularly good on Arab reactions to the Holocaust. It effectively demonstrates that the claim that the Arabs masses welcomed the Nazis was totally false. He cites Israel Gershoni, of the University of Tel Aviv, that ‘the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices . . . rejected fascism and Nazism’ (pp. 42–43). Examples include the Syrian independence movement which defended Syria’s Jews against attack and the Palestinian daily Alif Ba which condemned the August 1934 anti- Jewish riots in Algiers, as well as the Nazi government, for driving out its Jews (p. 45). The main Palestinian daily, Filastin, consistently depicted Nazism as reactionary and dictatorial from 1933 onwards displaying ‘an acute awareness, which can only be termed premonitory, that Hitler’s accession to power would reinforce the Zionist enterprise’ in Palestine (p. 48).

Arab political reaction to Zionism saw it as the catspaw of the British. The Istiqlal (Independence) Party of secular Palestinian Arab nationalism, unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism. It was ‘forthright in proclaiming that the British not the Jews, should be the primary targets of action . . . ’ (p. 95). Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zionism’s ‘new Hitler’, argued, in December 1953, that ‘Arab leaders forget the primary cause of our defeat, England, and say Israel and the Jews. They are afraid to say England’ (p.189). Zionist leaders however ‘admitted they preferred dealing with the underlings of the much maligned Amin al- Husseini’ (p. 50) just as in the 1980s they encouraged the formation of Hamas to undermine secular Palestinian nationalism (Shlaim 2001: 459). Zionist historians portray Arabs and Muslims as uniformly anti-semitic and pro-Nazi. Stefan Wild’s (Wild 1985: 130) ‘lamentably influential’ study of Nazism’s impact on the region during the 1930s (p. 68) devotes just one page to Ba‘athism, yet this page ‘contains so many errors, distortions and deliberate omissions that it has become an obligatory source for polemics hostile to Arab nationalism’ (p. 68). For example, Wild asserts that the founder of Ba‘athism, Michel Aflaq, was pro-Nazi on the basis that he purchased a copy of Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century! (p. 69). Orientalist Bernard Lewis, another Zionist historian, asserts, without any evidence, that the Egyptian Free Officers Group of Nasser was pro-Nazi (p. 85), whereas Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who wrote a doctoral thesis supporting Holocaust denial and a foreword to a pamphlet by French holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, is Zionism’s favourite Palestinian (pp. 269–270).

Both Bernard Lewis and the late General Yehoshafat Harkabi (Harkabi 1972: 298–299), Israel’s leading academic orientalist, accepted that Arab anti-Semitism was a symptom of the conflict, ‘functional and political not social’ (p. 242). Achcar makes the important distinction between European neo-Nazis, whose use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism describes a Jewish conspiracy, and Arabs who use it to prove a Zionist conspiracy. Even Meir Litvak and Esther Webman accept that the Protocols ‘provided a reasonable explanation for the Zionist phenomenon’ (pp. 204–5; also Litvak and Webman 2009: 7).

The main example of Arab support for Nazism was the Farhud, the pogrom in Baghdad, when up to 190 Jews were murdered. In fact it only occurred after a coup against the British in April-May 1941 was put down (pp. 99–102). The coup was anti-British not pro-Nazi (pp. 90–91). The Iraqi communists, who never hesitated to condemn all manifestations of anti-Semitism, gave it their full support. The number of victims would have been far larger if the Jews’ Muslim neighbours had not sheltered and protected them. Their behaviour ‘contrasts favourably with that of European populations confronted with similar events’ (p. 100). Marion Woolfson raises questions about the role of the British during the Farhud (Woolfson 1980: 155–163). Another example of Arab ‘anti-Semitism’ was the hanging of two Zionist agents in Baghdad in January 1952. They had been caught in possession of explosives and had detonated bombs outside the Masuda Shemtov synagogue and Jewish cafes, to stimulate Jewish emigration to Israel (Woolfson 1980: 182–201; Hirst 2003: 281–290).

When the Zionists mounted a campaign among Iraqi Jews in Israel against the executions, they found that the attitude among most exiles was ‘This is God’s revenge against the movement that brought us to such depths’ (p. 197).

Yad Vashem and the Re-writing of Holocaust History

Zionist historians exploit the fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, helped set up the Waffen SS Muslim divisions, Handschar, Kama and the Albanian Skanderberg. But these divisions were so reluctant to participate in anti-Jewish actions that they were sent to France for retraining, whereupon they promptly mutinied and attempted to join the French resistance, the only known rebellion of an SS unit. The Bosnian SS units played no part in the anti-Jewish deportations, which were left to the Croatian SS and the Nazis. The religious leaders of the Bosnian Muslims issued no less than 3 declarations condemning Croat-Nazi collaboration against the Jews and Serbs (p. 143). Contrast this with the silence of the German Churches who, even when they did condemn the killing of innocents of another race, ‘neither the word “Jew” nor “non-Aryan” ever crossed their lips’ (Lewy 1968: 292).

Although the Skanderberg division turned over 210 Jews to the Nazis in Kosovo, not one Jew was handed over in Albania to the Nazi death mills (p. 144; also Schwartz 2005). The largest Jewish community in North Africa, in Morocco, under Vichy control, also successfully protected its Jewish citizens from deportation. They fared better than Jews in any European country under Nazi occupation (Marqusee 2008: 221). Yet of the 23,000 non-Jews honoured by Yad Vashem there are only 60 Muslims and not one single Arab.3 Only the Zionists fondly remember the Mufti, who was appointed in 1921 by Britain’s Zionist High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, despite coming fourth in elections (p. 129; also Weinstock 1979: 117). Yet the article on the Mufti in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is longer than that of Himmler and Heydrich combined and only slightly shorter than Hitler’s entry (p. 159). Ironically the Zionists remain silent about Lehi, the Zionist group led by a triumvirate including Yitzhak Shamir, which offered a military pact to the Nazis on 11 January 1941 (Brenner 1983: 265–269). Forty-two years later Shamir became Israeli Prime Minister – from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992. The Haganah, the Labour Zionist militia, sent an agent, Feivel Polkes, to Germany with an offer to spy for them against the Communists (Brenner 1983: pp. 93–5, 99).

A cardinal principle for Zionism is that the Holocaust is unique, beyond history. To compare it with the sufferings of others is, according to Elie Wiesel, a ‘total betrayal of Jewish history’. But then the real purpose of Holocaust awareness ‘is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the future’ (Finkelstein 2001: 45, 41, citing Evron 1983: 15). At the centre of this manipulation stands Yad Vashem. When one of its guides, Itamar Shapira, pointed out that Yad Vashem is located a few hundred metres from the ruins of Deir Yassin,4 he was dismissed. Shapira explained that ‘Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews . . . If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dir Yassin, or the Nakba . . . it means that it’s afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed’.

The response of Yad Vashem was that ‘the institution objects to any political use of the Holocaust . . . The institution’s position is that the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other event. . . ’ (Stern, 23.4.09).

This did not, however, prevent Yad Vashem building a special wall devoted to the Mufti’s relations with the Nazis, its purpose to suggest that ‘there is much in common between the Nazis plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs enmity to Israel’ (Segev 1994: 425). In April 1976 Yad Vashem hosted a visit by John Vorster, Apartheid South Africa’s Prime Minister, interned during the Second World War for his support for the Nazis (pp. 226–7). As the late Professor Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen, said of Yad Vashem: ‘its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt’.5

Achcar’s book has been received uncritically by the Left. It is an impressive, indeed ambitious work but it is not without its faults. Despite its author’s Marxist politics, it is primarily descriptive rather than analytical. The explanation of ideological phenomenon such as ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ is circular: ‘Islamic fundamentalism, because of its attachment to the letter of the holy scriptures . . . perceives religion as the prime mover of the world . . . ’ (p. 109); this is true of all religions. The question is why, in the 21st century, movements that look backwards hold such sway? Why has a Reformation never taken hold in Islam or Judaism? Achcar holds that whereas ‘anti-Semites perceive Jews as members of a “race”, fundamentalists regard them as members of a faith’ (p. 109). This is an oversimplification. Racial anti-Semitism could also take, as in the Slovakian and Croatian Nazi puppet states, a clerical form.

Where Achcar goes astray is with his argument that the Palestinian national movement made a ‘major historical error’ in not supporting the 1939 White Paper. Made with the benefit of hindsight, Achcar effectively says the Palestinians should have accepted their defeat in advance and agreed to a slimmed down Zionist state. This argument fails to understand the expansionist nature of Zionism. Achcar is also wrong when he suggests that the British proposed net Jewish immigration of 75,000 a year for five years from 1939 (p. 138). It was 75,000 in total. (Hurewitz 1976: 102–104; also Lacquer 1972: 528). The British counter-insurgency war of 1936–39, having armed and trained the Zionist militias, savagely put down the Palestinian Arab Revolt. A strategy based on British imperialism keeping its promises is a strange one coming from a Trotskyist! Achcar argues that Nasser’s ‘fundamental error’ was in failing to recognise ‘Zionism’s success in forging an Israeli Jewish nation’ (190–1, 215). But how would this have been of any benefit to the Palestinians? Would it have enabled all 200 bi-nationalists in Brit Shalom, to triumph? They included Ruppin, a supporter of ‘transfer’, Kalvarisky and Arlosoroff, were all leading Jewish Agency members, whose main interest was in the peaceful acceptance by the Palestinians of Zionist demands. As NathanWeinstock observes, ‘Even the maverick Brit Shalom . . . was every bit as insistent as the Revisionists on opening up Palestine to mass Jewish immigration’ (Weinstock 1979: 152). Racial exclusivity has always been integral to Israeli Jewish ‘nationality’.

Achcar’s problem lies in his very specialisation. The Arabs and the Holocaust does not have an overview of either Zionism or the Holocaust or settler colonialism. How else to explain the assertion that the ‘indigenous population of “Rhodesia” obtained the same political rights as the population of colonial origin in 1960’? It was only in 1980 that white minority rule ended. Likewise Achcar’s assertion that the Final Solution was initiated in 1942 (p. 25). On 31 July 1941 Göring sent Heydrich orders to begin implementing the Final Solution (Dawidowicz 1987: 170, 175–6). Belzec began construction in November 1941,6 Chelmno began operations on 8 December 1941 (Browning 2005: 418). On 3 September 1941 Auschwitz had already carried out an experimental extermination of 600 Russian POWs and 250 Polish prisoners. The Holocaust began with Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 and the slaughter of up to two million Jews by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads.7

Zionism –Racist?

Achcar suggests that Zionism was as ‘morally excusable as the reactive racism of blacks to white racism’. However he fails to understand the Zionist dialectic. In Europe Zionism sought an alliance with anti-semitic regimes and rulers such as the Czar of Russia. Zionist policy was based on the belief that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’ (Patai 1960: 83–4). To the Kaiser he explained that ‘we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties’ (Patai 1960: 729).

From its inception Zionism was integrally linked to the colonisation of Palestine and the achievement of state power in Palestine. Achcar describes ‘statist Zionism’ as a Janus type movement, ‘one face turned towards the Holocaust, the other towards the Nakba’ and the ‘obstinate insistence with which both sides fix their gaze on only one face is the source of their inability to communicate’ (p. 275). This implies that the Palestinians have an equal responsibility in respect of the Holocaust that Zionism has towards the Nakba.

Yet what is noticeable is how many in Israel have begun identifying with the Nazis – from neo-Nazi Russian gangs,8 to a retired judge who believes that Israel must learn from Nazi tactics,9 to Israeli soldiers identifying themselves as the Mengele Squad,10 to right-wing Israelis shouting at Jewish supporters of the Palestinians that ‘Hitler was Right’11 to settlers daubing ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ on walls.12 How in practice would a Palestinian focus on the Holocaust bring a solution any nearer? When a group of Arab women from the West Bank recently visited Yad Vashem they were told ‘Get out of here, you sluts’, by high-school students: ‘This place is ours, and there is no room for Arabs’.13 Clearly the lesson that they had learnt from their visit to Yad Vashem was not an anti-racist one. Achcar compares the use by Palestinian communists of the label ‘fascist’ to describe the ‘socialist leaders’ of ‘socialist Zionism’ to the third period of Stalinism when social democrats were termed ‘social fascists’ (p. 56). This is a false analogy. Social democracy and fascism were mutually antagonistic. Labour and Revisionist Zionism both agreed on the need for a Jewish State. Their disagreements were primarily tactical. This is best epitomised by Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatza‘ir, of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation. They supported binationalism, whilst also forming the backbone of the elite Palmah shock troops of the Haganah, who spearheaded the expulsions and massacres of the Nakba.14 Zeev Sternhall termed Labour Zionism ‘nationalist Zionism’ (1998: 18–19, 25, 32).

To Achcar the problem with equating Zionism and racism lies in its ‘totalizing nature . . . we can hardly treat all Zionists . . . as birds of the same racist feather’ (p. 274). Achcar confuses the movement with its adherents. Yet a majority of Nazi Party members opposed Kristallnacht in November 1938 (Kershaw 1983: 260–71).15 Even among party members a third of Peter Merkl’s sample gave no evidence of anti-Semitism, half were uninterested and just 13 percent were ‘paranoid anti-Semites’ (Marrus 1988: 12 citing Merkl 1975). Yet who could deny that the Nazi Party was anti-semitic?

Achcar’s formulation that the comparison between Zionism and Nazism is understandable when coming from Palestinian or Jewish anti-Zionists, but potentially anti-Semitic when coming from non-Jewish Europeans, because Europeans are ‘citizens of countries that were actively or passively responsible for the Holocaust’ is collective guilt and chauvinistic (pp. 224–225). When Anwar Kamil, an Egyptian Trotskyite, compared the Zionist use of the term ‘chosen people’ to the Nazi concept of a master race, Achcar ascribes this to an Islamic critique of Zionism (p. 60). When Professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University says of the children of the Hebron settlers that ‘they are exactly like the Hitler Youth’ (p. 234) Achcar finds this a ‘terrible comparison’. Despite formally repudiating it, Achcar still clings to the Zionist nostrum of the Holocaust’s uniqueness (p. 228).

Zionism, the Holocaust and the Creation of the Israeli State

Achcar’s conclusion that Israel ‘owes its creation to the Holocaust. . . ’ (p. 19) lies at the root of his reticence about Zionism’s role during the Holocaust and his ambivalence about the nature of Zionism. Achcar effectively adopts Isaac Deutscher’s famous analogy, that the conflict in Palestine is the equivalent of a man escaping from a fire by jumping from a window, injuring someone in the process and inviting retribution (Deutscher 1968:136–7). It is a conflict built on equal tragedies and therefore simplistic to see Israel as merely a settler colonial state. In actual fact the Zionist movement averted its eyes and kept silent during the Holocaust. Clearly Hitlerism gave the proto-Jewish State its critical mass and British imperialism would not have been so weakened by 1948 but for the war. However, like the other White Dominions, the Jewish settlers would have achieved independence, probably around the mid-1950s. Achcar has difficulty reconciling the Zionist record during the Holocaust with its role in Palestine. Yet the writing off of the Jews of Europe was consistent with the refusal to acknowledge that the indigenous people of Palestine also had rights. The Zionist movement was a singleminded one and ‘In spite of the certainty that genocide was being carried out, the JAE did not deviate appreciably from its routine . . . ’ (Teveth 1987: 844). Ben-Gurion made it clear that ‘In these terrible days . . . I am still more worried about the elections of the (Mapai) branch in Tel Aviv’ (Segev 1994: 105). 'Throughout 1939 and 1940, the situation of Europe’s Jews was not discussed once by Mapai’s Central Committee’ (Porter 66: 2008). ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism’ (Teveth 1987: 850). Achcar cites Ben-Gurion’s statement that ‘nothing takes precedence over saving the Hebrew nation in its land’ (p. 21) but draws no conclusions. Even more grotesque were the proposals in September 1942 to establish a memorial, Yad Vashem, to the Holocaust victims, whilst they were still alive. (Segev 1994: 104)

Achcar suggests that Ben-Gurion’s ‘relative indifference’ to the Holocaust was but one Zionist viewpoint (p. 21). As Saul Friedlander observed: ‘The rescue of the Jews in Europe was not at the top of the Yishuv leaders’ list of priorities. For them, the most important thing was the effort to establish the state’ (Segev 1994: 467; Brenner 1992: 201–214).16 Those Zionists who actively campaigned to make rescue the priority were ironically dissident Revisionists Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Achcar describes Zionist opposition to Jewish immigration to the West as a ‘lack of enthusiasm’, citing Zionist historian Francis Nicosia, that an understanding of National Socialism ‘eluded’ the Zionist leadership well into the war (p. 23). Nicosia does his best to exculpate the Zionist movement.17 Yet as early as January 1934 Ben-Gurion predicted that ‘Hitler’s regime puts the entire Jewish people in danger’. (Teveth 1987: 445) In December 1938 he described Hitler’s goal as the destruction of the Jews world-wide (Teveth 1987: 849). It was not ignorance but indifference and opportunism that paved the road to obstruction and collaboration. At the heart of his ambivalence is Achar’s description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as ‘exceptional’ (p. 31) because the Zionists were ‘fleeing a form of persecution as long-standing and brutal as European anti-Semitism. . . ’ In fact most colonists saw themselves as having been oppressed. Achcar’s argument seems like special pleading.

Arab Perceptions of the Holocaust

It is in the Arab perception of the Holocaust that Achcar’s book is at its strongest. Whereas Europeans see the Holocaust from the viewpoint of the perpetrators, Arabs see it as victims. This explains the role that Holocaust denial plays amongst Arabs. When Ahmedinajad hosted a Holocaust conference in December 2006 in Tehran, he was greeted with headlines such as ‘Enough stupidity’ in left-wing Beirut daily Al-Ahkbar. Dr Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, who was driven out of Israel by Shin Bet (‘General Security Service’) wrote in Al-Ahram that ‘Holocaust Denial does not undermine the moral justifications for the existence of the State of Israel as some imagine. What it does, however, is hand the European right and Israel a convenient enemy upon which to unload their problems’ (p. 254). Achcar asks the most pertinent question of all, namely whether all forms of Holocaust Denial are the same (p. 261). Many Arabs reacted to Zionism’s propagandistic use of the Holocaust by denial. This is entirely different from European neo-Nazis, who hope for a repetition of the Holocaust they deny.

Footnotes
1 Los Angeles Times, 26 March 2010.

2 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/among-the-righteous/ (accessed 12 December 2010). Satloff’s motive was that if Arabs could identify with an Arab Schindler and knew of the history of the Nazi/Fascist occupation of North Africa, then perhaps they wouldn’t espouse holocaust denial views.

3 Ynet 14 November 2010: ‘Righteous among the Arabs’, at: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3978445,00.html

4 http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/257.shtml (accessed 29 December 2010).

5 Kol Ha’ir (Jerusalem), 19 May 1989.

6 http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191 (accessed 29 August 2010).

7 Jurgen Matthias, ‘Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust’, in Browning (2005: 244).

8 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2418221.ece

9 Ynet, 5 July 20.10, ‘Israeli judge: Learn from Nazis’, at: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3915394,00.html

10 Haaretz, 1 October 2010, at: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/themengele-squad-1.316622

11 At: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2010/02/hitler-was-right-say-zionists.html

12 The Independent, 23 June 2004, ‘Breaking silence over the horrors of Hebron’, at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/breaking-silence-over-the-horrors-of-hebron-733173.html

13 At: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-short-anthology-of-racismin-israel-1.334878 3 January 2011, ‘A short anthology of racism in Israel’.

14 At: http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Palmach_-_The_Palmach_in_Politics_and_Culture/id/5363334 (accessed 1 January 20.11).

15 According to one survey, just 5 percent of Nazi Party members approved, 63 percent were opposed and 32 percent were indifferent (p. 265).

16 See speech of Yitzhak Greenbaum, Chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee, 17 See Tony Greenstein’s review of Francis Nicosia’s The Third Reich and the Palestine question and Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Weekly Worker 792 (5 November 2009), at: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003781.

References

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—(2002) 51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (New Jersey: Barricade Books).

Browning, Christopher (2005) The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942 (London, Arrow Books).

Dawidowicz, Lucy (1987) War Against the Jews (Harmondsworth, Penguin).

Deutscher, Isaac (1968) The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Evron, Boas (1983) “Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster’, Radical America 17, No. 4 (July–August): 7–21.

Finkelstein, Norman (2001) The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso).

Harkabi, Yehoshafat (1972) Arab Attitudes to Israel (London: Valentine, Mitchell and Co.).

Hirst, David (2003) The Gun and the Olive Branch (New York: Nation Books).

Hurewitz, YC (1976) Struggle for Palestine (New York: Schocken Books).

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Lacquer, W (1972) A History of Zionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston).

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Litvak, Meir and Esther Webman (2009) From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst & Co.).

Marqusee, Mike (2008) If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (London: Verso).

Marrus, Michael (1988) The Holocaust in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson).

Merkl, Peter (1975) Political Violence under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (New Jersey: Princeton University Press).

Nicosia, Francis (1985) The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London: I.B. Tauris). —(2008) Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press).

Patai, Ralph (1960), The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl (London/and New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff).

Porter, Anna (2008) Kasztner’s Train (London: Constable).

Satloff, Robert (2006) Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Land (New York: Public Affairs).

Schwartz, Stephen (2005) The Jews, the Serbs, and the Truth, FrontPageMag.com http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=9203, 21 March 2005 (accessed 10 January 2011).

Segev, Tom (1994) The Seventh Million (New York: Domino Press).

Shlaim, Avi (2001) The Iron Wall-Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin).

Stern, Yoav (23.4.09.) http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/yad-vashemfires- employee-who-compared-holocaust-to-nakba-1.274624 (accessed 1 January 2011).

Teveth, Shabtai (1987) Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886–1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifline).

Weinstock, Nathan (1979) Zionism: A False Messiah (London: Inklinks).

Wild, Stefan (1985) ‘National Socialism in the Arab Near East between 1933 and 1939, Die Welt des Islams, vol. 25 no. 1/4, pp. 126–63.

Woolfson, Marion (1980) Prophets in Babylon – Jews in the Arab World (London: Faber & Faber).

Pragmatism in the Service of Imperialism

From anti-Zionist to Supporter of a 'Jewish' State

This is taken from Pragmatism in the Service of Imperialism an article I wrote last week for the Weekly Worker. See also The Case for Apartheid, Norman and The Tragedy of Norman Finkelstein – Time to Say Goodbye (‘a brilliant refutation of Norman's position’, Ilan Pappe.

Last November 11th, Norman Finkelstein gave a talk at the Institute of Education. It was a sell-out. Every seat was filled and a thousand people attended. Finkelstein came on half an hour later, like a rock star, to rapturuous applause. It was sponsored by the Palestine Return Centre and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.

However the Norman Finkelstein who spoke was a different person from the person who had written Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering [Verso, 2000]. The latter was a savage criticism of the way the Zionist movement and US imperialism have used and exploited the extermination of European Jewry in the service of settlement, expansion, war and genocide. One example of this was the refusal of Elie Wiesel to pressurise the Israeli government into ending the supply of weapons to the Guatemalan Junta, which murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians in the 1980’s. Genocide is fine by Zionism’s favourite Auschwitz survivor, as long as Jews aren’t the victims.

Norman Finkelstein was the brightest star in the firmament. His searing academic dissection of Zionist propagandists and frauds was second to none. Joan Peter’s fraudulent From Time Immemorial, which asserted that the Palestinians were recent immigrants to Palestine attracted by the Zionist economy, was blown out of the water. [Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question Chapter 2 (1988)]. Among the many jewels in Peter’s crown was her citation of the medieval Arab historian, Makrizi, who died in 1442, as an eye-witness to mid-nineteenth century population movements!

Finkelstein’s critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which blamed the holocaust on something inherent to being German, holding that Nazism was benign except for the Jews, was clinical and merciless. For Goldhagen problem was not fascism or Nazism but ‘eliminationist’ anti-Semitism. ‘Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’ Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ New Left Review I/224, July-August 1997. When Metropolitan Books agreed to publish Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth by Finkelstein and Bettina Birn, it came under legal pressure not to publish. Birn was chief historian of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Canadian Justice department.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, proclaimed that ‘the issue… is not whether Goldhagen’s thesis is right or wrong but what is ‘legitimate criticism’. Publisher Sara Bershtel’s response was ‘(It) is precisely the issue.’ (HI, p. 66)

Finkelstein, a political scientist, went head to head with Zionism’s holocaust historians, for whom all criticism of Zionist behaviour during the holocaust or their use of the holocaust as a propaganda weapon is ‘illegitimate’. With two parents, both survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the extermination camps, he was able to command authority when he wrote on the subject. Finkelstein understood how Professor Bauer, Guttman, Fatran et al. of Yad Vashem, the Zionist Holocaust & Propaganda Museum, used the extermination of over 5 million Jews to intimidate and silence all those who did not accept Zionism’s sanitised history. Instead of being a movement of collaboration, Zionist fiction was that it had led the resistance and been proved ‘right’ when it said that Jews could never live among non-Jews.

Yad Vashem created the ideological underpinnings to the use of the holocaust to justify Israel’s war against an indigenous population. Finkelstein showed how Zionist organisations that claimed reparations from Germany, in particular the Jewish Claims Conference, had stolen and defrauded the survivors, via expense accounts, lawyers and ‘educational projects’, whilst the survivors had to don yellow stars and pyjamas and take to the streets to protest about the theft of their money and resulting poverty.

Finkelstein provided us with the absurdity of how Ronald Reagan, who in his Bitberg speech in 1985, had described the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, “as victims of the Nazis as surely as the victims of the concentration camps.” was awarded by the Simon Wiesenthall Centre the title of ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ in 1988 and the Anti-Defamation League of Abe Foxman gave him the ‘Torch of Liberty’ in 1994.

But the SWP lives in hermetically sealed ideological spheres – one marked anti-fascism and holocaust, the other ‘anti-Zionism’. Ne’er the twain do they meet. Guru Professor Alex Callinicos, declared that Finkelstein was “dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts”. The tunnel vision of the SWP prevents it from understanding the difference between the holocaust and the holocaust industry. That Zionism’s misuse of the holocaust is the real comfort for holocaust deniers.

Finkelstein’s second book, ‘Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History’ [University of California Press, 2005] proved that Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz’s book ‘The Case for Israel’ was plagiarised. He had faithfully copied their mistakes! One of the consequences of his attack on Dershowitz, was that Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University.

But Finkelstein is a man in a hurry. In his own words, “I switched hats from a critic of Israel to a diplomat who wants to resolve the conflict.” Norman Finkelstein has had a remarkable academic career. The warmth of the audience was testimony to that fact. Yet Finkelstein has taken advantage of his reputation in order to promote an imperialist settlement of the Palestinian Question.

Today Finkelstein does not mention the word ‘Zionism’. Israel is just another state gone astray. Its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an aberration. Its treatment of Arab Israelis merely another example of how states (mis)treat their minorities.

Finkelstein’s attacks on the Boycott movement for not supporting a 2 State solution is as breathtaking as it is misplaced. It is PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, that first made the call for a Boycott. It is Palestinians who call for boycott. He has found the magic bullet and expects Palestinians to fall in line. He compares his formative political influences in Maoism, in his words a political cult, with the Boycott movement. Finkelstein expects Palestinians to pay the price for his political gymnastics.

Finkelstein’s problem is his lack of any class analysis. He sees the United Nations as representing the ‘community of nations’. International law is his panacea. But international law is helpless against US drone attacks on Pakistan’s North Western Frontier. It is might and might alone which lies at the heart of imperialist power relations with their client regimes in the underdeveloped world. Even in the imperialist metropolis, when the bankers and capitalists are challenged, the police resort to naked and brutal force against peaceful protest, as when the Occupied protesters were pepper-sprayed in Oakland, California. Of course the law gives a semblance of authority and rationale to the rule of capital. It legitimises the US’s actions and those of western imperialism through institutions such as the UN. But the UN can only act when the USA allows it to. That is why Israel is allowed to break international law with impunity and just to make sure, the US vetoes all resolutions which are critical of Israeli actions.

The UN has a Human Rights Council and Commissioners. Not one country has proposed that the UN reverse its policy of opposition to torture, yet a large majority of its members practice torture as an act of state policy. Yet this is the body which Finkelstein argues can impose a just solution to the Palestinian question. The same UN which was responsible for endorsing the creation of the Israeli state and which has never proposed a single sanction against Israel for disregarding its resolutions on the refugees, settlements and occupation.

Every year the United Nations passes by an overwhelming majority a motion, calling for a just solution to the refugee problem and proceeds to do nothing. The UN is a gang of thieves and cut-throats. Its representatives include all the worlds’ butchers. In the 1970’s, at the US’s insistence, the representatives of Pol Pot and the genocide of up to 2 million people in Cambodia also took their rightful seats in the Assembly. The only people who are not represented in the UN are the poor and impoverished. The UN is a parody of a democratic world society which in practice the UN is controlled by the Security Council, on which the major imperialist powers have a right of veto.

The Indian government pays lip service to the Palestinians but they also have close military relationships with Israel, as do Sri Lanka and China yet all 3 states support the Palestinians in the UN! The same is true of most Arab states.

Finkelstein puts his eggs in the basket of international law. Yet the whole concept of international law is dubious. Who legislates for the ‘international community’? How is international law implemented? Who is accountable? What body impartially administers it? The International Criminal Tribunal and Court prosecute only anti-western war criminals. Bush, Blair and the Pinochets have nothing to fear. Only secondary war criminals get their collar felt.

Finkelstein argues that ‘You can’t be selective with the law.’ ‘The law is a package’ but this isn’t true. Most people understand that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.

Law is not neutral. It reflects the interest of the ruling classes in society, the powerful and rich. This is even more true of international law than domestic legislation. Law in capitalist society is concerned not with human rights or justice but property. We can see that in the complicity of New Labour and the execrable Jack Straw with extraordinary rendition. Torture is illegal but never has it thrived so.

In 1948 ¾ million Palestinian Arabs were expelled in order that a Jewish majority could be created in Israel. As Israel’s Arab population has grown, Israel’s racist demographers, such as Professors Arnon Sofer and Sergio Della Pergola, argue that a 2 State solution is necessary in order that Israel can remain a ‘Jewish’ state. What Finkelstein is saying is that Zionism should be allowed its victory with the resulting apartheid discrimination against Israel’s 1.5 million Arabs. Not only should the exile of 3 million refugees should be ignored but they should effectively be allowed to repeat the process since 2 States is an open invitation to expel Israeli Arabs into it.

Finkelstein says that ‘There is nothing in the international consensus which says anything about Palestinian minority in Israel. You want to drag in that minority and start talking about them you’ll get nowhere. The whole world persecutes their minorities. Or every country in the Middle East.’ But very few states are founded on the expulsion of a majority. The analogy is false. National minorities normally want to secede or obtain genuine autonomy, whereas in Israel the majority wants separation and expulsion.

The fact is that Norman Finkelstein is not an anti-Zionist. He sees Israel, not as a settler-colonial state but just another normal western state. But in most European countries there is, at the official level, at least an attempt to eradicate direct and obvious racial discrimination. In the European Union there have been Race Directives and legislation aimed at outlawing racial discrimination. Anyone living in Britain today knows that racism on the football terraces is clamped down whereas Jerusalem’s Beitar football team openly refuses to play an Arab and its supporters can stage an anti-Arab pogrom, unhindered by the Police. In Britain the Scarman Report deemed the cost of racism as being too high.

In Israel the State and its parties compete as to who is the greater racist. The state introduces legislation which is overtly racist such as a Citizenship Law which prevents Israeli Arabs living with another Arab in Israel. The Palestine Papers, [Clayton Swisher, Hesperus, 2011] describe how Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni negotiated with the Palestinian Authority about transferring Israel's Arab citizens into any future bantustan. To pretend that Israel’s racism is no different from other countries is to fail to understand the nature of Zionism.

In ‘Norman Finkelstein bids farewell to Israel bashing’ (Ha'aretz, 5.4.12.) Finkelstein says that "Nobody really defends Israel anymore," apart from a few Zionist zealots. It is true that Israel is losing the propaganda battle. The reason is that deeds outweigh words, despite the best efforts of the BBC. The idea of a little David (Israel) against the Arab Goliath has not been heard of for some time. But winning or losing the battle of public opinion, which to Finkelstein is so important, is only half the battle. Opinion polls in the US support taxing the rich but Congress simply ignores it. The idea that western foreign policy is opinion driven is but one of Finkelstein’s mistakes.

But support for Israel is not negligible. There is a close linkage between western economies and that of Israel. If the political case against Israel has begun to be won, it is because of the reality on the ground and the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. A campaign that Finkelstein opposes.

There has also been a process of political clarification. Support for the Palestinians comes primarily from the Left. It is the Right, including the BNP and EDL (and the AWL!) which support Israel. 30 years ago, stalwarts of the Labour Left like Tony Benn and Eric Heffer were members of the Labour Friends of Israel. Support for Israel was a defining hallmark of New Labour. Support for Israel is today the preserve of western elites. As oil supplies decrease the militarisation of the Middle East proceeds apace and with it Israel’s utility to the West. Although most western countries would concede a 2 State solution, they are not prepared to pressurise their watchdog. The settlements and confiscations are Israel’s political price.

It is true that ‘young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements.’ But it was always a fiction that support for Israel depended on a ‘Jewish’ vote. Jews and the Holocaust were the cover for imperialist interests. This is not new. Britain expanded its empire at the same time as its navy patrolled the African coast seeking to intercept slave boats. Very few imperial powers have justified what they did in terms of naked interests.

Without a doubt the loss of Jewish intellectual and political support for Zionism heralds the beginning of the end. That is why it is important to be clear that seeking to repartition Palestine represents a continuation of the conflict.

The weakness of Finkelstein’s politics is exemplified by his adoration of Mahatma Gandhi. Ghandi represented the rich peasants and Indian capitalists in their battle with the British. He was extremely wary of the use of the strike weapon for nationalist ends and called off the mass ‘no tax’ Bardoli campaign in 1922 for fear of its success. As George Orwell wrote:

‘Gandhi has been regarded for twenty years by the Government of India as one of its right hand men. I know what I'm talking about-I used to be an officer in the Indian police. It was always admitted in the most cynical way that Gandhi made it easier for the British to rule India, because his influence was always against taking any action that would make any difference.

The reason why Gandhi when in prison is always treated with such lenience and small concessions sometimes made when he has prolonged one of his fasts to a dangerous extent, is that the British officials are in terror that he may die and be replaced by someone who believes less in "soul force " and more in bombs.[1]

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol 2, p. 136

Gandhi was a friend of the Jute and Steel mill owners and despite his ‘pacifism’ recruited for the British army in the first world war as well as accepting Britain’s communal electorates that paved the road to the butchery of Partition in 1947. Ghandi’s mythical status owes much to a British wish to deceive people that passive resistance won out over a cold and calculated decision that Britain was no longer able to afford to hold on to India.

So too with the Palestinians. An independent state alongside a militarily powerful Israeli state would be the Palestinian Authority writ large. It would be a travesty of independence and make the Apartheid era Bantustans seem like models of independence. Most people in the Boycott campaign don’t support a 2 State solution because such a solution is an apartheid solution. It will leave intact a ‘Jewish’ state based on the idea that there will always be a Jewish majority.

A Palestinian ‘state’ alongside will be an open invitation for further expulsions. What Finkelstein asks is for supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism to endorse Israel’s right to continue along the apartheid road. The demographics of Israel are different from South Africa. Within the area of Palestine/Israel there is a rough parity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. In South Africa Whites were outnumbered at least 6-1. After the war against Angola was lost and then the formation of Zimbabwe, South Africa was never again able to dominate its neighbours. In the Middle East the Arab Spring has been absorbed and diverted by imperialism. Israel has remained largely untouched except for its first mass movement, the tent protests.

At the heart of Finkelstein’s advocacy of 2 States lies his own political confusion. Israel is abnormal, a state not of its own citizens, but of the ‘Jewish people’. He devoted a chunk of his speech in November to the inability of Israel’s most ‘liberal’ Chief Justice Aharon Barak to reconcile the irreconcilable – that Israel is both a Jewish and a Democratic state. Yet he drew no conclusions from the fact that even though democracy means that Palestinians have the right to form a majority Israel’s status as first and foremost a ‘Jewish’ state, a state which accord privileges to those defined as Jewish, means that it can never be democratic. As Meir Kahane, the neo-Nazi Zionist Member of the Knesset for Kach, used to say, either Israel is a Jewish or a democratic state. It cannot be both.

In fostering illusions in the 42 yeard old ‘peace process’ Finkelstein helps provide a fig-leaf for Occupation. Even open anti-Arab racists like Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, support a 2 State solution. But because Zionism’s goal is the biblical Land of Israel, any Palestinian state is anathema. A Palestinian statelet can only be a temporary solution until such time as it is reconquered and its inhabitants expelled across the Jordan. As Moshe Dayan explained (Ha’aretz, 12.12.75):

‘Fundamentally, a Palestinian state is an antithesis of the State of Israel… The basic and naked truth is that there is no fundamental difference between the relation of the Arabs of Nablus to Nablus and that of the Arabs of Jaffa to Jaffa… And if today we set out on this road and say that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state because they are natives of the same country and have the same rights, then it will not end with the West Bank. The West Bank together with the Gaza Strip do not amount to a state… The establishment of such a Palestinian state would lay a cornerstone to something else… Either the State of Israel — or a Palestinian state.’

Finkelstein sees ‘statehood’ as an end in itself. He makes no attempt to spell out what a 2 State resolution would mean in practice. Hence his ‘diplomacy’ never extends to asking why should Israeli Jews and Arabs live separately in different states? Are they incompatible as used to claimed by the Whites of South Africa? This is not nationalism but racism of the nationalist variety. Far from achieving ‘peace’, all the racial fantasies and fears of ‘dirty Arabs’ will build up behind the border.

Partition has an unenviable record. A response to the calamity of colonialism, it has been a terrible failure, whether in Ireland, India or Cyprus. Yet the cerebral Finkelstein doesn’t even acknowledge the possibly calamitous consequences.

Israel/Palestine is already an apartheid unitary state, with half the population deprived of all political and civil rights. The real task is to de-Zionise Israel and create one unitary, secular and democratic Israel/Palestine. Like all settler peoples, the Israeli Jews, are Jewish Palestinians.

An interview with activist Frank Barat has recently surfaced. In the interview Finkelstein says:

‘Yes BDS has had some victories, but … it’s a cult. I’m tired of it. I went through my cult stage I was a Maoist. There were 2 competing possibilities – you can be a Maoist/Leninist and waste 20 years of your life. You can work with Ralph Nader, lot of bills through Congress. Nice we have seat belts and airbags – that was Nader. I’m not going to be in a cult again. Gurus in Ramallah giving marching orders.’

Finkelstein appears to believe that he has wasted his life on a cause that isn’t bearing any fruit. Banished from Israel and the West Bank, he is turning on the solidarity movement and BDS, looking for a pragmatic solution within imperialism and capitalism. He has become attracted to what he believes is immediately achievable, hence Ralph Nader is his consummate political hero. Finkelstein has grown cynical of revolutionary change, which is what the liberation of Palestine demands. He is not so far from the reactionary cultish Maoism he purports to abjure.

Finkelstein says ‘If you are serious about politics you can’t go beyond what the public accepts, and that is international law.’ This is his most important and enduring political mistake. Israel does not today rule over 4-5 million Palestinian Arabs because ‘international law’ granted them permission to do so. It does so because Zionism was based on “creating facts on the ground” From this there came the law.

Finkelstein insults and caricatures the BDS movement as a ‘little ghetto’ ‘a cult’. If this were so, it is hardly likely that the Knesset would pass a law which effectively criminalises calls for a Boycott of Israel. Israeli propaganda now focuses on ‘deligitimisation’ of Israel.. BDS, has forced Zionism onto the back foot. It throws into question the legitimacy of the Zionist state and its apartheid institutions. Finkelstein belittles its accomplishments but BDS has made a significant impact, not only economically but in the academic, cultural and political arenas.

Veolia has just suffered a £500m loss of contract in West London and is trying to withdraw from the Jerusalem light railway project. The decision of British and Irish trade unions to support BDS has hurt the morale of the Israeli state. Our task is to turn these resolutions into reality. The growth of supermarket boycotts is a reflection of the growth in support for Palestine. A range of artists and musicians, Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Santana, have supported the cultural boycott and refused to play in Israel. Others have disrupted Israeli concerts in London. There is even a Boycott from Within group in Israel itself.

Finkelstein makes much of the ruling of the International Court of Justice, which declared the Apartheid Wall illegal. It also stated that the pre-1967 border is legally Israel’s border. The ICJ’s ruling though useful propaganda wise, has been ignored, its ruling ‘advisory’. So when Finkelstein says ‘You want to enforce one state, don’t pretend you want to enforce the law’ then we have to say that we aren’t fighting to enforce the law but to obtain justice, a very different thing!

Of course the Palestinian struggle faces major problems in comparison with the Anti Apartheid movement in South Africa. The liberation movement there was based on the Black working class and the Communist Party leadership. The Palestinian leadership is made up of collaborators and wannabee oppressors. The PA in Ramallah tortures those under its control as does Hamas. Both opposed the movement against Mubarak and suppressed demonstrations against the tyrant. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the last resort of the Egyptian military, are the parents of Hamas, who only joined the demonstrations against Mubarak at a late stage.

Norman Finkelstein has abandoned support for the right of the Palestinian refugees to return. He asks ‘Will a person in the public find it reasonable to demand 6m Palestinians go back to a country with 1.8m Palestinians and 5 million Jews.’ Put in those terms probably not, but that is not the choice. Most Palestinians given the chance to return will not take it up. They will likely choose to stay where they are, but they should have the right to return if they wish. Most European and American Jews will likely return to Europe. Already many of them possess 2 passports. Israeli Jews are increasingly seeking an escape route.

Finkelstein says that ‘If we end the occupation and we bring back 6 million Palestinians and we have equal rights for Arabs and Jews we have no Israel. That’s what it’s really about and you think you’re fooling anybody?’ It is hard to disagree. If equal rights for Arabs and Israelis means no Israel, then that is a price well worth paying. Of course this will deal a blow to sectarians on the Palestinian side too.

The Crisis of Zionism

Endorsed by Bill Clinton - Beinart Laments for an Israel that Never Was

This is an excellent response to Peter Beinart’s Crisis of Zionism. Beinart is a child of the neo-conservative and Zionist establishment. As well as being the author of The Crisis of Zionism, he is a former editor of The New Republic, an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and senior political writer for The Daily Beast, on-line Newsweek site.

He is also one in an increasingly long line of those who want to have their cake and eat it. Oh for the good old days of Labour Zionism and ‘purity of arms’, socialist kibbutzim, talk of chaverim (comrades), shooting and crying and all the hypocrisy associated with Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan.

Beinart’s book, which comes with a hefty endorsement from Bill Clinton, is still trapped in that circumlocution known as ‘a Jewish and Democratic State’. But of course one has to give in a land of colonial settlement. Does the democratic bit include non-Jews? And what if they were to attain a majority? How can one democratically prevent Palestinians from taking over the ‘Jewish’ state other than by expulsion or massacre, which most people wouldn’t equate with democratic.

All of these questions of left unresolved although Beinart acknowledges them. Israel didn’t suddenly turn nasty in 1967. Racism wasn’t a recent phenomenon but ran through the very concept of a ‘Jewish State’ i.e. a state where those who are not Jewish are, at best, tolerated guests. Was it not the hero of the Labour Zionist movement, Yitzhak Rabin, who first embarked on a campaign of ‘breaking bones’? And was not Rabin responsible for the massacre and expulsion at Lod and Ramleh in 1948?

The reality is that the Zionist project was poisoned from the very start. All its apartheid features took shape under Labour Zionism not Likud. Indeed when Histadrut and the Labour Zionists were campaigning for Hebrew (i.e. not Arab) labour, it was the right-wing Zionists of Menachem Begin (Herut) who opposed them. Why? Because Herut represented the petit-bourgeois, property owner and farmer who was quite happy to exploit cheaper Arab labour, without though as to the ‘national’ consequences of so doing.

But Labour Zionism, having given birth to the bastard child of Zionism, recoils from the offspring that the bastard has produced. It would seem that 2 generations of bastards are too much, even for liberal Zionism. Beinart’s arguments are in themselves pretty superficial but what is more important is what they represent. Beinart isn’t any fly by night college graduate but deeply implanted into the think-tanks of the American bourgeoisie. He reflects much wider concerns, not least the growing divorce between US Jewry and Israel. For Israel to rest solely on its Christian United 4 Israel supporters will be to strip away its magic. Having arch-bigots, anti-abortionists, homophobic Islamaphobes such as John Hagee and Glenn Back on your side is not much of a bonus! Indeed it is frightening the (American Jewish) children!!

The problem though is that Israel is like an aircraft carrier. It is difficult to turn around and not only that, but the Captain is countermanding US orders and seeking to undermine the Chief of Staff. Joseph Dana’s analysis below is an excellent riposte, not least to Norman Finkelstein’s nonsense that the 2 States Solution is a practical possibility today.

Tony Greenstein

The Crisis of Zionism: Undeterred by unavoidable realities

Joseph Dana
Apr 20, 2012

On my first trip to the West Bank, I was struck with a strange sense of familiarity. I left my apartment in Jerusalem and set off driving south, passing Bethlehem on my left and Israeli settlement blocks on my right. Driving through the Occupied West Bank, I stopped at an Israeli petrol station, just like the ones in my neighbourhood. I stopped at an Israeli national grocery chain and was almost apprehended by Israeli traffic police for speeding as I rejoined the well-maintained road. Despite the fact that I was in the middle of Occupied Palestinian Territory, I felt as though I was still in Israel and, according to the Israeli legal system, I was.

On the surface, every sector of Israeli society, except religious settlers and the military establishment, understand the occupation to be an ephemeral security measure necessary only in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Likewise, many in the international community, especially American Jews, believe that Israel is desperately working towards a two-state solution which will finally end Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, the reality on the ground is markedly different.

Settlements continue to grow despite the attention they receive in the media. New immigrants from the United States, France and South Africa as well as Israelis from Tel Aviv pour into the steady supply of homes over the 1948 Green Line in search of a modest house with a garden at a reasonable price.

New settlers are only part of the Israeli mosaic in the West Bank. Israel’s economy is deeply entrenched beyond the Green Line. Recently, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Israeli companies could extract natural minerals from the rich land of the West Bank. The main water aquifers which supply thriving Tel Aviv and Haifa are found under the mountain top city settlement of Ariel. The captive economy of Palestine is a central and lucrative focal point for Israeli exports.

Given this entrenchment of infrastructure, the cornerstone of Israeli society, the army, is symbiotically connected to the West Bank. Israel’s famed conscription is maintained at such high levels, in part, to allow for a constant supply of soldiers needed to patrol the dark corners in between the hills of the West Bank.

Israel’s massive military industry, almost unrivalled throughout the world and known to provide the latest “combat tested” equipment, ranging from drones to tear gas canisters, uses the West Bank as a research and design laboratory. Without the West Bank and its hundreds of Palestinian villages, which double as elaborate training grounds, the industry would surely suffer.

The current Israeli parliament, controlled by an aggressive pro-Settler majority which enjoys enormous popularity in Israeli opinion polls, is busy ensuring that criticism of Israel’s slow annexation of the West Bank is quickly silenced. New laws, like the recently passed anti-boycott legislation that makes nonviolent calls for boycotts of Israel by Israeli civilians a civil crime, have completely erased the Green Line. Human rights organisations which attempt to document Israel’s routine violations on the ground are also targeted with harsh funding laws and vile attacks on the evening Israeli news programmes.

When social justice protests erupted in the centre of Tel Aviv’s cafe-lined streets, all discussion of the occupation or even its economic impact was discredited as political. The time to talk about the social rights for Israelis is now, the protesters claimed, and discussion of the occupation is merely exhausted political banter. Despite the desire of some to draw a connection between social justice and an end to the occupation, Tel Aviv residents, by and large, rubber stamped the occupation. Without a doubt, the social justice protesters, ballooning at times to 500,000 people, demonstrated that there is no longer a large segment of Israeli society that is willing to demand an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

How did Israel’s occupation become entrenched beyond repair? When did an equitable two-state solution become irrelevant? These questions are creeping into the American discourse and factual debate concerning their contours has thrown the American Jewish community into a crisis, one which has been suppressed for a long time.

Expanding on his landmark manifesto in the New York Review of Books called, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, Peter Beinart sets out to address American Jewish silence on Israel in a new book, The Crisis of Zionism. For Beinart, a generation of young American Jews can no longer identify with Israel as an occupying country. Reconciling their upbringing, soaked in victimhood and Holocaust memory, with the colonial actions of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza is near impossible in the age of new media. Without honest engagement, American Jewish support for Israel risks its own liberal values.

Evidently not strong enough for him to emigrate from New York to Jerusalem, Beinart has a deeply emotional relationship with Zionism. His book is a personal chronicle of his development as a Zionist, which began, of all places, in South Africa. He presents raw reflections about his personal process of awareness of Israel’s immoral treatment of Palestinians, but is careful not to denounce them by always providing an Israel caveat.

Beinart’s arguments are not new or even particularly original, let alone based in reporting from Israel. His analysis draws on a variety of books and reports which don’t capture the entire dialogue taking shape in cafes in Tel Aviv, let alone Ramallah, but allow him to present a slightly new analysis of why the two-state solution has failed. Even those he holds responsible for Israel’s present ills – chief among them revisionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – are the traditional enemies of American Zionists who start to feel uncomfortable when racism towards Palestinians is clearly articulated, as opposed to quietly carried out.

At its core, The Crisis of Zionism is an ode to liberal Zionism – that confusing ideology which rallies behind the idea Israel can exist as a Jewish and Democratic state – a place where liberalism coexists with tribalism.

Yet, Beinart’s liberal Zionism is a paradox. Zionism, as an ideology and practice, privileges one ethnic group over others. Ignoring this and other bothersome aspects of Israel’s liberal democracy, like the absence of a constitution or the existence of discriminatory laws directed at Israel’s Palestinian citizens, Beinart diverts attention to Israel’s occupation as the root of the country’s problems. West Bank settlers and their allies are portrayed as fanatics, blinded by religious zealotry, which have hijacked Israel’s liberal democracy for their own messianic purposes.

Beinart takes the argument to the extreme in The Crisis of Zionism and a subsequent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he argues that there exists a “democratic Israel”, namely the liberal democracy that exists within the 1948 boundaries of the State of Israel and an “undemocratic Israel”, the West Bank, where Israel controls Palestinians without giving them citizenship and deprives them of basic rights. Not only does this absolve Israelis living in Tel Aviv of responsibility for the entrenchment of the occupation, his separation of the West Bank from Israel safeguards the liberal foundations of Zionism.

This is not how the situation looks on the ground. The Israeli government, which is democratically elected, is responsible for all of the actions of the settlers and the creation of the settlements. Israeli settlements are a by-product of Israeli democracy and not a negation of it. Recent poll data demonstrates that a majority of Israelis support the construction of new settlements and the growing power of the right in the Israeli parliament confirms that. The left-leaning, liberal Israeli, which appears like a Herzlian figure for Beinart, most likely has a son patrolling the streets of Hebron or conducting night raids in Ramallah as part of his military service.

These unavoidable realities do not deter Beinart. His solution for the manufactured impasse between undemocratic and democratic Israel is a targeted boycott of Israeli settlements. Not only is this impossible in practice, but it conceals a more sinister objective.

Beinart’s boycott borrows rhetoric and tactics of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in order to marginalise it. The BDS movement, while calling for an end to Israel’s occupation, focuses on dismantling Israel’s system of inequality through global nonviolent pressure. In a strange and perhaps flawed way, the BDS movement is a last ditch Palestinian effort to appeal to the very liberal elements in Israeli society, which Beinart is interested in expanding, by isolating the exclusivity of Zionism.

Perhaps the actual crisis of Zionism is the fact that liberal Zionist writers, who deeply care for Israel, are unable or unwilling to accept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is increasingly being defined as a battle over rights and equality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians are coalescing around nonviolent boycotts targeting Israel’s system of inequality while Israel is destroying its own democratic foundations in an attempt to protect its ideology of exclusion. Rigorous critique of Zionism, not Israeli settlements, is the first step towards safeguarding Israel as a haven for Jews while preventing the country from sliding deeper into moral bankruptcy.

Joseph Dana is a journalist based in Ramallah.