Uri Avnery on Trump and Israel’s Anti-Semitic Zionists

The accusation that Ken Livingstone is a anti-Semite is partly based on his historically accurate statement that there was initially an agreement between the Zionists, or at least, some of them, and the Nazi party, to take Jews out of Nazi Germany and smuggle them into Palestine, then under the British Mandate. This was when sections of the Nazis didn’t care where Jews went, so long as they weren’t in Germany. It’s the Haavara agreement, and is recorded fact. There is an entry for it on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Israel. The agreement didn’t last very long. Nevertheless, it existed. And at the end of last year, Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom, wrote a piece in Counterpunch describing other collaborations between Zionists and anti-Semites.

His article was a response to Netanyahu’s reaction to a UN motion condemning Israel for its expansionism and maltreatment of the Palestinians. The UN had attempted to have similar motions passed many times before, but had been blocked by the US, using its veto. This time Barack Obama had not blocked it, and the motion had passed.

Netanyahu was furious. He withdrew Israeli ambassadors from Senegal and New Zealand, nations that have always been friend to Israel, called in foreign ambassadors to upbraid them, and generally ranted and raved.

Avnery states that while it was monumentally stupid on a diplomatic level, it was a very astute move domestically. It allowed Netanyahu to present himself as the virtuous defender of his nation, another David pitted against the Goliath of the UN. He makes the point that Jews and Israelis have taken a perverse satisfaction from the rest of the world’s opposition to them. In his view

For some reason, Jews derive satisfaction from a world-wide condemnation. It affirms what we have known all the time: that all the nations of the world hate us. It shows how special and superior we are. It has nothing to do with our own behavior, God forbid. It is just pure anti-Semitism.

As an example of this bizarre mentality, back in the days of Golda Meir one of the Israeli army’s dance band used to play a tune with the lyrics ‘The whole world is against us/ But we don’t give a damn…’

He goes on to say that the establishment of the state of Israel was supposed to put an end to this, by making Israel a normal country. But it hasn’t. He goes on to observe how Donald Trump has sent a rabidly right-wing Jewish American to Israel as his representative, a man so right-wing he makes Netanyahu seem liberal, while also appointing as one of his closest aides an anti-Semitic White racist. He states that Trump can support both anti-Semites and Zionists simultaneously as both have the same goal of taking Jews out of their historic homelands and relocating them in Israel.

He states that Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, tried the same tactic with the anti-Semites of Tsarist Russia. Herzl offered to persuade the Jews to emigrate, if the Russians helped them. This was during the horrific pogroms of the late 19th century. it didn’t quite work as Herzl wanted, as the Jewish emigrants largely went to America, not Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

He also gives as an example of such anti-Semitic Zionism the British and American evangelicals, who preached that the Jews should return to Israel. This was before the foundation of the Zionist movement proper, though he suggests it may have served as one of the inspirations for it. These evangelicals did so in the belief that the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland would result in the Second Coming of Christ. This would be followed by the conversion of a minority of Jews to Christianity. Those, who did not convert, would be destroyed.

Later other members of the Zionist movement cooperated with anti-Semites in Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe. 1939 the extreme Zionist leader, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky approached the anti-Semitic commanders of the Polish army with a similar deal to the Haavara Agreement. If they took on and trained Jews, the Zionists would send them to Palestine to liberate the country from the British, and the Jews would then leave Poland to emigrate there. This plan collapsed after the Nazi invasion.

During the War, but before the Holocaust, Abraham Stern, the founder of the Irgun, approached Adolf Hitler through an intermediary in neutral Turkey, offering to aid the Nazis against the British. Hitler didn’t reply.

Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz also attempted to make a number of deals with the Zionists. Eichmann approached Israel Kastner and his group in Budapest. If the allies gave the Nazis a thousand trucks, he would halt the deportations. As a good will gesture, he allowed a few hundred Jews to escape to Switzerland. Kastner sent Yoel Brand as his messenger to the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem. However, he caught by the British and so the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews continued.

Netanyahu’s right-wing minister of defence, Avigdor Lieberman, also went berserk at the French plan to convene a meeting to secure a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in Paris. Avnery notes that the French plan was almost identical with one he and his friend published in 1957. Lieberman, however, went off ranting that it was the notorious Dreyfus Affair all over again, referring to the case in which a Jewish officer in the French army was court-martialed and sent to Devil’s Island on trumped up charges motivated by his accuser’s anti-Semitism.

Despite the French offer of a peaceful settlement, the Israelis still want Trump, with the Zionists and anti-Semites in his administration, to support them.

See http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/30/trump-and-israels-anti-semitic-zionists/

Counterpunch Article on Israel’s Fear of Arab Jews

Earlier this evening I put up a piece about John Newsinger’s article on Labour and the anti-Semitism allegation in Lobster. Newsinger quotes a Jewish historian of the Holocaust, a passionate Zionist, to show that Livingstone was correct about the Zionists’ cooperation with the Nazis to encourage European Jews to emigrate to Israel to escape Nazi persecution. Newsinger also goes beyond this, to show how several of the great Zionist founders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, had nothing but contempt for the many incredibly courageous German Jews, who were determined not to give in to Hitler and his hordes. These included patriots, who had fought for their country in the carnage of the First World War, who formed the Reichsbund judischer Frontsoldaten. (Literally, ‘Imperial League of Jewish Soldiers of the Front’. These ex-servicemen were particularly awkward for Adolf’s goons, as in no way could they be reasonably accused of being ‘unpatriotic’.

A few days ago, the American radical Left magazine and website, Counterpunch, put up a piece by Jonathan Cook about Israel’s distrust of the Mizrahim. These are Jews from the surrounding Arab nations. Initially, the Israelis didn’t want to encourage them to immigrate, as they were afraid they would dilute the culturally superior Western element and so retard the country’s progress and acceptance as an equal by the Western nations. They were only allowed in because the Holocaust meant that there was a shortage of Ashkenazi and Western Jews to provide the new country with labour. One of the ways the Mizrahim were recruited to Israel was through false flag attacks on their homes in the Arab countries, for which their gentile compatriots were blamed. Inside Israel, they were segregated, and forced to attend separate schools. Like the British schools in Wales and Scotland, which penalised pupils for speaking the indigenous languages of Welsh and Gaelic, the Mizrahi pupils were forbidden to speak Arabic. And once again, David Ben Gurion showed that he was disgustingly bigoted and racist towards them, too, as well as those Jews, who wanted to continue to be Europeans. He called the Mizrahim ‘human dust’ and ‘rabble’. Cook notes that these Israelis have internalised the hatred of Western Jews towards them, and are as bitterly anti-Arab as they are. Indeed, they often provide solid support for Likud and the parties of the Israeli religious Right.

These issues came to the fore as Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, banned Mohammad Madani, an official close to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, from entering Israel, accusing him of terrorism and other offences. Madani had been trying to establish contact with Israeli Jews, but had made the cardinal sin of contacting the Mizrahim, rather than the ruling Ashkenazim. For Cook, Madani’s ‘crimes, as defined by Lieberman, are worth pondering. They suggest that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is rooted less in security issues and more in European colonialism.’

See:http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/23/israels-fear-of-the-arab-jews-in-its-midst/

This is the reason behind liberal anti-Zionism. Left-wing critics of Israel don’t criticise it and document its misdeeds and atrocities from an animosity towards the Jews, but because they view it as a European-American settler state. And this affair certainly shows that there is much to this analysis. It seems to show the fear and distrust of a European ruling elite to the indigenous peoples of the region, even if they are other Jews.