16.11.2017

Quoting Nazis to damn ‘the Zionists’

From Solidarity November 8 2017

Had it not been distributed as a leaflet at this year’s Labour Party conference, Moshé Machover’s article, ‘Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism’, would have been just another turgid and distasteful article which had found a natural home for itself in the pages of the Weekly Worker.

A longer version of the same article - entitled ‘Don’t apologise - attack’ - had been published in the Weekly Worker four months earlier. According to that article:

•  Anyone who thought that a retweet by Naz Shah MP - which had suggested that Israel (and, presumably, its population) should be relocated to the USA - “was anything but a piece of satire should have their head examined”.

•  Jackie Walker “has been suspended for saying that there was not only a Jewish holocaust, but also a black African one too.” (Wrong: that was not the reason for her suspension.)

•  There was nothing anti-Semitic about NUS president Malia Bouattia describing Birmingham University as “something of a Zionist outpost”.

•  Ken Livingstone was “certainly inaccurate” in having said that Hitler supported Zionism until he went mad”. At the same time, “the point he was making was basically correct”.

The inclusion of a shorter version of the article in a Labour Party Marxists bulletin distributed at Labour Party conference rescued it from obscurity. Overnight, Machover’s article became a cause célèbre for left anti-Semites (and anti-Semites in general). Zionism is essentialised. Machover unceasingly refers to “the Zionists … the Zionists … the Zionists”. Unlike any other nationalism, Zionism is portrayed as a uniformly negative monolith.

Legitimate complaints about anti-Semitic arguments and ways of thinking are dismissed as a Zionist concoction: “And so the Zionists and their allies decided to launch the ‘Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism’ campaign.” This “campaign” is an international (cosmopolitan) one: “The whole campaign of equating opposition to Zionism with anti-Semitism has been carefully orchestrated with the help of the Israeli government and the far right in the United States.”

Anti-Semitism is defined in such a way that its existence in the labour movement can simply be denied as being of no account: “The handful of people of the left who propagate a version of the ‘Protocols of Zion’ carry no weight and are without any intellectual foundation.”

Unlike others who share his current politics, Machover does not define Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism. But he does portray collusion with anti-Semitism as inherent in Zionism: “You can also attack Zionism because of its collusion and collaboration with anti-Semitism, including up to a point with Nazi Germany.”

This brings Machover round to the trope of Zionist-Nazi collaboration: “Let us now turn to the Zionist-Nazi connection … The Zionists made overtures to the Nazi regime, so how did the Nazis respond? … In other words, a friendly mention of Zionism, indicating an area of basic agreement it shared with Nazism.”

The “friendly mention of Zionism” cited by Machover is a quote from an article written in 1935 by Reinhard Heydrich, published in the Das Schwarze Korps, the in-house magazine of the Nazi SS: “National socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, so-called Zionism.”

Heydrich was a hardened anti-Semite from the early 1930s onwards. He was one of the architects of the Final Solution. Only a few months earlier he had made clear his attitude towards Jews in another article in Das Schwarze Korps:

In order to preserve our people, we must be harsh in the face of our enemy, even at the cost of hurting an individual or being condemned as rabble-rousers by some probably well-meaning people …

If someone is our enemy, he is to be vanquished subjectively and without exception. If, for example, out of false compassion, every German should make an exception for ‘only one decent’ Jew or Freemason whom he knows, we would end up with 60 million such exceptions.

Ten years before Heydrich’s article Hitler had already dismissed a Jewish state as “a central organisation for their [Jews’] world swindling … a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks”.

Thus, to illustrate the “basic agreement” which Zionism supposedly shared with the Nazis, Machover quotes an architect of the holocaust, from an article in the magazine of the organisation which played a leading role in carrying out the holocaust.

It is not about supporting the Palestinians. Machover says explicitly: that’s not enough. You must also demonise “the Zionists” as an evil essence running through history to link Jews today back to the taint of the Nazis.

Dale Street