02.06.2016
Relationship of mutual dependency
Zionism uses the term ‘anti-Semitism’ against anyone who opposes its crimes against the Palestinian people, writes Eli Aminov
When Binyamin Netanyahu enlisted Adolf Hitler in October last year to claim that the responsibility for the holocaust and the extermination of European Jewry lies with the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, and with the Palestinian people, he also stated that the Führer wanted at the beginning of his rule to only expel the Jews, and it was the mufti who persuaded him to exterminate them. This rehabilitation of Hitler, as carried out by Netanyahu, may not have made Hitler into a Zionist, but did indeed give him the status of a pro-Zionist, like many other anti-Semites.
While Netanyahu was unsuccessful in linking the Palestinian struggle with the holocaust, this recurring wave of accusations has prompted a surge of attacks which were aimed at purging the critics of Zionism within the British Labour Party. This was all carried out under the pretext of combating anti-Semitism.
‘Anti-Semitism’ is a derogatory term which the Zionist movement has associated with anyone who opposes it or its crimes against the Palestinian people. But history shows that Zionism and anti-Semitism are in fact like Siamese twins. Anti-Semitism in the literal sense today is mainly expressed through the hatred of Muslims - the vast majority of whom are Arabs - in Europe, and in that respect Israel is by far the world’s most anti-Semitic country. Along with the expressed opposition to Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, the more traditional anti-Semitism, which focuses on the hatred of Jews, is also rearing its head. It is fed by both Israeli propaganda, which claims to represent world Jewry, and by the fact that more and more people around the world understand that Israel is an apartheid state, which was built on the basis of a continuous act of ethnic-cleansing and the denial of human and civil rights from its non-Jewish subjects.
Building the common interest of anti-Semites and Zionists had already been started by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. His network of relations and lobbying efforts included not only the murderous and dictatorial Ottoman Sultan or the conquest-driven German kaiser, but also the anti-Semitic tsarist regime - the Great Prince Vladimir, Count Witte, as well as Plehve, head of the tsarist police and organiser of the Kishinev pogrom. In 1903, Herzl had obtained a letter from Plehve, which reads: “If Zionism means the establishment of an independent state in Palestine and promoting the emigration of Jewish subjects from Russia, then it can take into account the moral and material support of the Russian government.” For his part, Herzl pledged that world Jewry would not attack Russia in response to the pogrom which was carried out by Plehve’s men. Indeed, Zionist diplomacy at its best.
Zionism’s inability to exist without anti-Semitism had already been anticipated by Ahad Ha’am in 1897. In his criticism of Herzl, The Congress and Its Creator, he writes: “From [Herzl’s] notebook we learn that the soul of the whole [Zionist] movement, also to this day, is anti-Semitism alone. It is still dependent on being “influenced” by that which gave it birth, as a baby who constantly needs its mother. And if it had passed away from this world, also [Zionism] will not be able to survive for even a single moment.” Simply put - there is no Zionism without anti-Semitism.
Zionism and Nazism
Zionist diplomacy was also reflected in its relationship with Nazi Germany. In his book Nazi Germany and the Jews, Saul Friedlander tells of the memo sent by the leaders of the Zionist organisation in Germany to Hitler in June 1933, to which a researcher of the Third Reich had commented: “It seems that the memorandum reveals a degree of sympathy with the Folkist principles of Hitler’s regime and claims that Zionism is compatible with these principles.” Friedlander then elaborates: “The first reaction of some Zionist leaders on the new situation in Germany was not negative. There was a hope that the Nazi policy of promoting Jewish emigration from Germany would open up great opportunities for the Yishuv [Zionist settlers in Palestine].”
On the other hand, the Zionists also feared too many immigrants, as Arthur Ruppin declared during the 1933 Zionist Congress in Prague: “In order that immigration will not flood the Yishuv like hot lava …” As is well known, the Zionists had openly violated the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany by signing the Transfer Agreement with the Nazis, and had been purchasing German goods with German Jews’ money.
The highlight of its shocking solidarity with the Nazi view of racial purity can be found in the 1934 book by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who was among the Zionist leaders in Germany. In his book Wir Juden (‘We, the Jews’), Prinz had expressed his satisfaction with the “German revolution” that had destroyed liberalism: “The only form of political life which had helped Jewish assimilation had sunk and disappeared,” celebrated Dr Prinz, who saw the Nazi racial laws as “fulfilling our aspirations”. He then continues:
We wish that assimilation today will be replaced with a new law: a declaration of belonging to the Jewish people and the Jewish race. A country which is built on the basis of national and racial purity can only be respected by a Jew who declares his affiliation with his own species.
This gross flattery of Hitler did not prevent this Judeo-Nazi from later becoming an American citizen and the deputy chair of the World Jewish Congress, as well as being a close friend of Golda Meir when she was prime minister of Israel.
Saul Friedlander also mentions in his book the crisis that arose between Zionists and non-Zionists at a conference of Jewish bankers in London in November 1935 concerning the rescue of Jews from Germany. Chaim Weizmann was strongly opposed to Max Warburg’s plan of using the funds of German Jews to finance Jewish emigration into countries other than Eretz Israel. Until the outbreak of World War II the uncompromising conflict continued. The Zionist leadership vehemently opposed the US joint position, wanting to save Jews by sending them wherever possible. The Zionist position was: ‘To Palestine or to hell’.
Propaganda
The claim of ‘anti-Semitism’ is what fuels the Zionist movement today, as well as being a foundational element in its strategy of fear. This core element is regularly being used in both domestic and foreign policy, while constantly being maintained by a huge propaganda machine.
The propaganda is based on the outrageous Zionist claim that the state of Israel represents the whole of world Jewry, both politically and morally, even if they do not wish to be represented in this manner. This propaganda is designed for two main purposes: transforming world Jewry into the human shield of Zionist policy - a shield whose role is to conceal Israeli crimes from the rest of the world; and, secondly, to undermine the confidence of Jews in themselves, while driving them to emigrate to Israel.
Zionism had purported to solve the ‘Jewish question’ by establishing a ‘safe haven’ for Jews in historic Palestine. But the formula had been reversed: the ‘safe haven’, which has become the most dangerous ghetto for Jews today, needs new Jewish immigrants in order to maintain its demographic superiority, as well as to serve as cannon fodder for the Israeli army. Jews around the world who do not wish to be exploited by Zionism and who do not require it are turned into Israel’s hostages against their will and even into potential victims of its actions.
Allegedly, Israel and the Zionist movement try to fight anti-Semitism and cry out for a global effort against it. But in reality such a struggle would contradict the real interests of Zionism, mainly for practical reasons: a successful struggle against racism and anti-Semitism would allow Jews to continue as equal citizens in other countries - and then what would happen to Zionism? From its inception, the Zionist movement had adopted the position of the anti-Semites: that Jews constitute one people, who are alien among European nations. Therefore, they should be separated from the others - the gentiles - and be concentrated in a single territory (where again they should be separated, from the native gentiles).
Lucien Wolf, a leading figure among British Jewry, wrote to Rothschild in 1916 concerning this idea:
I understand ... that the Zionists do not merely propose to form and establish a Jewish nationality in Palestine, but that they claim all the Jews as forming at the present moment a separate and dispossessed nationality, for which it is necessary to find an organic political centre, because they are and must always be aliens in the lands in which they now dwell … I have spent most of my life combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism.
Those who are not poisoned by the Zionist ideology may understand differently the statements of Ken Livingstone, a former British Labour Party member and mayor of London, regarding Hitler’s Zionism, and also the irritating question of the Venezuelan ambassador to the UN with regard to the “final solution” prepared by Israel against the Palestinians. They do not constitute anti-Semitic expressions, but a staunch criticism of Zionism, which is a colonialist, racist, violent and hypocritical movement.
Zionism today endangers not only the Palestinians, not only every Israeli citizen, but also the whole of world Jewry which Israel has taken hostage in order to protect its criminal policy. The Labour Party leadership in Britain, which was quick to denounce Livingstone, has played into the hands of the Zionist movement. Instead, it had better understand and explain to the public that there should be no confusion between the struggle against anti-Semitism and support for its evil twin - Zionism.
This translation, by Ronnie Barkan, first appeared on the website of the Grayzone Project: www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/mutual-dependency-zionism-and-anti-semitism.