Israel, Hitler, and the War on Racial Intermarriage

In November last year, 2018, that redoubtable opponent on Fascism and Zionism Tony Greenstein put up an article attacking the Likud government and the Israeli state for trying to discourage mix marriage between Jews and Palestinians, entitled ‘Israel’s War on Interracial Relationships and Miscegenation’.

The article was provoked by the controversy in Israel over the marriage of Lucy Aharish, an Arab TV news presenter, and Tsahi Halevi, the star of the TV series Fauda. The marriage was denounced by Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and Oren Hazan, a Likud backbencher, as well as Yair Lapid, the head of the Centre Party, Yesh Atid. The article also reported how various Israeli towns, like Petah Tikva, have tried to stop Jews socializing or marrying with Palestinians. That municipality has set up a special team to tackle Jewish women dating Arab or ethnic minority men. In the East Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev a vigilante group of young men patrol the streets seeking to disrupt any romantic meetings between Jews and ethnic minorities. As well as Petah Tikvah, Tel Aviv and Kiryat Gat also have government sponsored campaigns to prevented racial mixing. There’s even a counselling programme for Jewish women in an interracial relationship, as well as phoneline for people to ring to inform on Jewish women going out with Palestinians. The religious organization, Yad L’ahim, also assists these campaigns with its Anti-Assimilation Department, which has produced a video for use with the police.

Back in 2011 Tzipi Hotoveli, in her role as Chair of the Status of Women Committee in the Knesset, invited the racist far-right party Lehava to speak on how marriages between Jews and non-Jews could be prevented. The Education Ministry under Naftali Bennett also removed two books from the English language curriculum, Borderlife and Trumpet in the Wadi in 2015 and 2016, because they were romances between Jews and Palestinians. The article also notes that there was a similar controversy over the marriage of another mixed couple, Morel Malka and Mahmud Mansour. Civil marriage does not exist in Israel, so Malka converted to her husband’s religion, Islam. The couple’s wedding ceremony was marked by a demonstration by Lehava, whose members screamed anti-Arab slogans, including ‘Death to the Arabs’.

The article concluded

Because for Zionists, mixed marriage is not so much a religious as a racial/national matter. Race in Israel is defined by religion, hence why inter-marriage is not so much considered a sin as a form of treason. That was what an opinion poll found in Yediot Aharanot. Over half Israeli Jews believe that marriage is ‘national treason’. ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/11/israels-war-on-interracial.html

This stance against racial intermixing is very similar to that of Apartheid South Africa and the American south during segregation. And, although the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism states that it is anti-Semitic to draw comparisons between Jews and Nazis, it is also very similar to Nazi Germany. The Nazis also passed legislation to prevent intermarriage between Aryan Germans and those peoples they judged inferior, like Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Blacks.

Hitler himself stated his opposition to miscegenation in Mein Kampf, where he claimed that the Aryans had declined through interbreeding with the peoples they had conquered and colonized. He wrote in Mein Kampf

The Aryan races-often in absurdly small numbers-overthrow alien nations, and favoured by the numbers of people of lower grade who are at their disposal to aid them, they proceed to develop, according to the special conditions for life in the acquired territories-fertility, climate, etc., the qualities of intellect and organization which are dormant in them. In the course of a few centuries they create cultures originally stamped with their own character of the land and the people which they have conquered. As time goes on, however, the conquerors sin against the principle of keeping the blood pure (a principle which they adhered to at first) and begin to blend with the original inhabitants whom they have subjugated, and end their own existence as a peculiar people; for the sin committed in Paradise was inevitably followed by expulsion.

Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: Paternoster Row 1933) 121.

The Israeli state’s attempts to ban interracial romances and marriage is therefore exactly the same as that of South Africa, segregation America, and Hitler’s Germany, regardless of the IHRA’s attempt to rule out any discussion of it as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is part of the regime’s colonialist nature and subjection of the Palestinians.

JudeoNazism: Jewish Scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s Term for Israeli Fascism

In an article attacking the decision of the Green members of Brighton and Hove’s council to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, Tony Greenstein quoted a number of senior Israeli figures – Naftali Bennett, the minister for education, Avigdor Liberman, Netanyahu’s wretched defence minister, to show how they matched Nazi pronouncements against the Jews. In so doing, they conformed to what the Israeli Orthodox religious scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz termed ‘Judeonazism’. Greenstein wrote

In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]

The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]

Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.

But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that

‘If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens ‘Revolting Trends’ in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany.

Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”

To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/10/brighton-and-hoves-green-councillors.html

Greenstein’s article contains links to a piece in the liberal Israeli paper, Haaretz, describing just how Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel it has created conforms to Professor Leibowitz’s concept, and to the Wikipedia entry on him.

Leibowitz was professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry and neurophysiology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish and Western philosophy. He also passionately believed in the separation of religion from state. In a 1968 essay, ‘The Territories’, he predicted a chilling future for Israel as a totalitarian, colonialist surveillance state. According to Wikipedia, he wrote

The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Forces, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshayahu_Leibowitz

While the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism forbids comparing Jews to Nazis as anti-Semitic, the comparisons are there, as Greenstein has pointed out many times. And Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, have regularly accused each other and the Israeli premier of being Nazis.

The I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism also forbids holding Israel to higher standards than other countries. This again is intended to prevent or stifle criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. But as far back as 1905 H.G. Wells attacked Jewish racism alongside that of the English, the Germans and the Italians in his book, A Modern Utopia. The book is a quasi-science fictional description of Wells’ ideas about what would constitute the ideal state. Wells himself believed passionately in a global, world government, in which all the races of humanity would share a common language and culture, and would live, work, study and move around the globe freely in peace and harmony. The chapter ‘Race in a Modern Utopia’ is one long diatribe against racism and racial prejudice which still remains acutely relevant. It is marred only by the fact that Wells was a eugenicist, who did believe that the undeserving poor and ‘inferior’ races should be prevented from breeding. In practice, however, he felt that even those races considered inferior at the time, Australian Aborigines and the Khoisan peoples of South Africa, would still contain skilled individuals, who would be allowed to have children and contribute to this new, global civilization.

About the growing European racism in his time, he wrote

And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthropometric variations and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True to the law that all human aggregation involves the spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science. With the weakening of national references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a larger proportion of the wars, hardships and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth. (pp. 118-9, my emphasis).

Wells’ predictions have horrifically been born out. In Africa, just a few years after Wells wrote this, the Germans embarked on a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Herrero in Africa. Then there were the Armenian massacres by the Turks, which convinced Hitler that he could murder the Jews without consequence from the other nations. And even after the War, Mosley was drawing on respected scientists to show that certain races were inferior, and therefore Blacks and other peoples should not be allowed to mix and intermarry with White Britons.

And across the world, including Israel, Fascism is rising again. Including Israel, which is quite prepared to support the Fascistic regimes in Poland and Hungary with their venomous hatred of Jews, Muslims, immigrants and Roma. Dr. Who last Sunday remined us of the courage and achievement of Rosa Parks in challenging racial oppression. And H.G. Wells, one of the ancestors of the series through his The Time Machine, still remains acutely relevant in his denunciation of racism today.

And as Wells, Prof. Leibowitz and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, have shown, Jewish Fascism exists alongside its gentile forms, and all have to be fought and combated.

Israeli Headmaster Objects to Use of Holocaust to Spread Fear and Xenophobia in the Young

Yesterday Counterpunch published a piece by Jonathan Cook attacking the Israeli government’s exploitation of the Holocaust and promotional days for the police and army to spread extreme nationalism and hatred of other, gentile nations, amongst its schoolchildren.

Cook describes how a video appeared last week, showing Israeli policemen acting out the killing of a ‘terrorist’ to a group of 10 year old schoolchildren. Meanwhile, on the country’s Independence Day last month, the army was also on parade, letting children play with guns, tanks and grenades. In one West Bank settlement, the children were painted with fake blood and equipped with fake amputated limbs as part of the fun.

Cook points out that the killing of the ‘terrorist’ in the police video, as he lay wounded on the floor, mirrored the real life murder of a wounded terrorist by an Israeli soldier. He also describes the killing of another ‘terrorist’, that has been denounced by the human rights group, B’Tselem. This was a 16 year old Palestinian schoolgirl, Fatima Hjejji, who had frozen after pulling out a knife a little distance away from an Israeli checkpoint. The soldiers then gunned her down. B’Tselem concluded that the girl was no threat, and did not deserve to die.

Cook states that the goal of the public relations exercises is to create a generation of traumatised children, intensely fearful of non-Jews. And the Holocaust is a part of this process indoctrination. He writes that a visit to Auschwitz is now a rite of passage for many Israeli schoolchildren. As for Holocaust Memorial Day, he writes

Holocaust Memorial Day, marked in Israeli schools last month, largely avoids universal messages, such as that we must recognise the humanity of others and stand up for the oppressed. Instead, pupils as young as three are told the Holocaust serves as a warning to be eternally vigilant – that Israel and its strong army are the only things preventing another genocide by non-Jews.

The result of this is that Israeli young people are now more extremely nationalist and ethnically and politically intolerant than their elders.

Four-fifths of Israeli schoolchildren do not believe there is any hope of peace with the Palestinians. Half of Jewish Israeli schoolchildren believe that Palestinians should not be allowed to vote. These attitudes are shared by the Israeli Defence Minister, Avigdor Liberman, who called Palestinian members of the Knesset, or those representing the Palestinians, ‘Nazis’ and said they should be treated as such.

And Israel’s declaration that it is the homeland of Jews all over the world turns the Palestinians into resident aliens in their own country.

Cook also describes the actions of some Israeli educators to criticise and act against all this. Zeev Degani, the headmaster of one of the country’s most prestigious schools, managed to cause outrage last year when he stopped the children at his school from going on the annual trip to Auschwitz. He stated that it was ‘pathological’ and intended to generate fear and hatred in order to inculcate extreme nationalism.

Degani and a few principals with similar liberal views have also invited the group, Breaking the Silence, into their schools. This is a group of former soldiers, who describe their participation in war crimes by the country’s military.

This naturally sent Naftali Bennett, a member of the Settler’s Party and the current education minister, into a fearful bate. Bennett then barred Breaking the Silence and other dissident groups, as well as books and theatre groups that threaten stability and order by encouraging Israeli schoolchildren to see the Palestinians as people worthy of compassion and sympathy.

Cook concludes

Degani and others are losing the battle to educate for peace and reconciliation. If a society’s future lies with its children, the outlook for Israelis and Palestinians is bleak indeed.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/16/israel-tutors-children-in-fear-and-loathing/

It’s a troubling, disturbing article, as clearly the goal of the Likudniks and their allies is to spread fear and distrust of foreign countries and non-Jews. Principal Degani and Breaking the Silence are to be applauded for standing up to the government’s demands to indoctrinate schoolchildren. As for Breaking the Silence, by recounting their part in atrocities committed by the military in order to spread a greater awareness of them, they are also doing what many servicemen in other countries have done. For example, when I was doing voluntary work some years ago in a private museum in Bristol, one of the books the museum received was a memoir by a former British soldier in Palestine of a war crime in which he had participated against the indigenous Arabs as a British squaddie. This man, like many others, who have been in similar situations, felt compelled to write his account in order to correct history and shine a light on the officers, who were really responsible for these atrocities.

I mention this as some of the attempts to defend Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians seem to suggest that Israel is unfairly being held to a different standard than other nations, or victimised because it is the Jewish state. This is not so. It is being criticised because it acts like other, non-Jewish, colonialist and Fascist settler states. And those former servicemen and women, who courageously speak out against the war crimes in which they have been involved, are doing exactly the same as other service personnel in other nations around the world, whose consciences similarly demand the public recognition of the injustices to which they, and their countries, are complicit.

As for the abuse of Holocaust Memorial Day to spread both fear of gentiles and the exclusion of any universal message against the persecution of other peoples and ethnic groups, this is one of the reasons why Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was libelled as an anti-Semite in a workshop on how the day should be commemorated last year. Walker, the daughter of a Black American mother and Russian Jewish father, who met during Civil Rights demonstrations in America, had objected to the exclusive concentration on Jewish genocide, and the way other groups were being ignored. Like the 12 million or so Africans, who were ripped from their homes in Africa during the centuries of the slave trade. The slavers killed the same number of people or more that they enslaved during their raids. Anti-Slavery campaigners in the 19th century claimed that whole regions of Africa had been left ravaged and depopulated through such attacks in search of men and women to sell overseas. And Black civil rights campaigners, such as W.E.B. DuBois in the last century have described this as a ‘Holocaust’.

But asking for such other Holocausts be commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day, at least if it is run by the group behind the event Walker attended, will get you libelled as an anti-Semite. Even if, like her, you’re Jewish, have a Jewish partner, and your child goes to a Jewish school.

I’ve also seen the scribbling on the net of right-wing Canadian groups connected to the Tory and Republican parties, who want to spread the same attitude over there. One such website, run by Kathy Shaidle, called ‘Five Feet of Fury’, regularly used to attack the ‘official Jews’ – the website’s term – of Canada’s main Jewish organisation, and its liberal leader, Bernie Farber. Farber and his fellows annoyed the rightists because they saw the Jewish Holocaust in universal terms, as one of the various genocides that have been perpetrated against different peoples, groups and ethnicities down the centuries. Thus, when the Janjaweed militias were enslaving and massacring the people of Darfur at the beginning of this century, Farber organised a ‘Shabbat for Darfur’. It was to be a solemn Jewish fast, to mark the solidarity of a people, who had suffered genocide, with the victims of another. And it sent Shaidle into further rage.

She and Ezra Levant, another right-wing journalist and broadcaster, also wanted there to be less concentration on White nationalists and Fascists, and more on Muslims. They argued that most non-Muslim Canadians were thoroughly decent people – which I’ve no doubt whatsoever is true – and that the Nazis in Canada had always been a tiny handful. The real threat, they said, came from militant Islam.

It’s very similar to the attitude taken by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Unlike Shaidle and her fellows, this outfit differs in that it massively plays up and exaggerates the amount of anti-Semitism in Britain, in order to scare Jews into emigrating to Israel. But it similarly has little or nothing to say about fighting the genuine Nazi fringe, and prefers to concentrate on painting Muslims in Britain as particularly anti-Semitic.

And you can see the same attitude in the American Zionist organisations. Jacques Torczyner, the head of the American chapter of the World Zionist Organisation, said that Jews should ally with the reactionaries, as this would result in greater numbers moving to Israel. You can also see it in Netanyahu’s own response to Donald Trump’s administration. Trump’s another quasi-Fascist, who’s appointed Richard Spencer, an anti-Semite and White supremacist, to his cabinet. Last night, The Young Turks reported that Trump had also ordered the anti-terrorism department of the American security services not to investigate White nationalist and supremacist organisations. Instead, they were to concentrate on Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that White Fascists commit the greatest number of terrorist offences in America.

But Netanyahu isn’t worried, because Trump also supports Israel, and has sent a particularly hardline Zionist to Jerusalem as America’s new representative.

Right across the world, in Britain, Canada and America, Zionist organisations like the scandalously misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are ignoring real Fascists and White supremacists, and promoting Islamophobia and a conscious retreat from a wider awareness of the persistence of genocide across societies and nations, in order foster an aggressive nationalism and exclusive sense of victimhood in Israelis and Jewish young people in order to encourage further emigration and solidarity with Israel.

And when they object, decent, anti-racist people, gentiles and Jews, who may themselves have suffered abuse and victimisation because of their ethnicity or friendship and solidarity with Jews, are smeared as anti-Semites.

Secular Talk on UN Condemnation of Illegal Israeli Settlements

Last week, the UN voted 14 to none against the construction of further illegal settlements by the Israelis in occupied Palestine, with America abstaining. As you can expect, this sent Benjamin Netanyahu into the petulant rage he and the Zionist authorities in Israel adopt whenever the international community dares to criticise them. Netanyahu attacked President Obama for apparently betraying Israel to its enemies, and told the UN ambassador for New Zealand that his country had virtually ‘declared war’ on Israel. Which is an utterly preposterous statement. I’m very much aware of the poverty and marginalisation experienced by New Zealand’s Maoris, the racism against them and other indigenous Pacific peoples, that have immigrated to the country. But in many ways, New Zealand is also a profoundly liberal society. I can recall reading in one of the old encyclopedias we used to have at school that a certain number of seats in the New Zealand legislature were reserved for the Maoris. I also think that Kiwi women had the vote in the late 19th century, decades before women in Britain had it. I can also remember looking through the prospectus of one of the universities in New Zealand when I was doing voluntary work for one of the museums here in Bristol. Many of the courses were very ‘right on’, explicitly tackling racism and the brutalisation of Black people. It seems to me that, despite its problem, NZ is very far from being any kind of racist, Fascist state.

Secular Talk have put up a couple of videos about this, pointing out the glaring, risible and grotesque faults in Netanyahu’s entire position and response. Kyle Kulinski, the host, makes the point that the UN has not attacked Israel as a country or denied its right to exist. It has merely demanded that Israel should abide by international law. He notes that whenever Israel is condemned for its human rights abuses, they make a great play of demanding that Israeli should only be condemned the same way other nations are condemned. Which is Kulinski’s position exactly. Kulinski also goes further, and makes the point that by ignoring the UN’s resolution on this, which he recognises is toothless, Israel will be breaking international law, and, by definition, be a ‘rogue state’.

He also criticises Barack Obama for taking a far too indulgent line towards Israel on this matter. Obama has not condemned Israel. He merely abstained from voting, which is hardly any kind of strong criticism. Despite Netanyahu’s ranting, America has always strongly supported Israel. Obama has given billions of dollars in aid to the country, and supplied the Iron Dome missile defence system. At one point, Kulinski says that what is needed is for Obama to cut off all aid the next time the Israelis accuse America of not doing enough for them. He also makes the point that the UN condemnation of illegal Israeli settlements would actually make the country safer, as it would remove one of the major objects of Palestinian resentment.

They also put up another video commenting on an interview on American TV with the Israeli minister of education, Naftali Bennett. Bennett was asked about the illegal settlements, and responded by flatly denying there were any. He also claimed that the Israelis weren’t violating international law by taking over the Palestinian part of the city and making it their capital, because it had been Israel’s capital for 3,000 years.

This is wrong, and a grotesque rewriting of history. Yes, Jerusalem was the capital of ancient Israel after it was conquered from the Jebusites by King David. Before then, it was a Canaanite city state under Egyptian suzerainty. Diplomatic letters from its mayor, requesting Egyptian aid against the other city states, have been preserved along with other documents in the Amarna archive from that time.

But for most of the past 2,000 Israel simply didn’t exist, and Jerusalem was not the capital of a Jewish state. After the Bar Kochba rebellion of the 2nd century, the Jews were expelled from their capital, and it was refounded as a pagan city. The seat of Jewish government moved to Galilee. After the Fall of Rome, it was part of the Arab Islamic caliphate. For a brief period in the Middle Ages it was conquered by the Crusaders, and became a Christian kingdom amongst the other Crusader states of Outremer. It was then reconquered by the Muslims, and up until the British mandate was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Bennett’s statement shows the Israelis’ determination to erase Palestinian history and that of the last 2,000 years. Last year, 2016, Counterpunch carried an article about the Israelis’ attempts to destroy every trace of the Palestinians’ own connection to their land through attacks on their education system. The article pointed out the high number of schools that have been attacked by Israeli forces, and the constraints placed on the Palestinians and the teaching of their culture in Israeli schools. It is illegal, for example, to teach anything about the Palestinians’ connection to their homeland, such as poems celebrating this aspect of Palestinian life.

In his desire to remove an entire people from history as well as dispossess them of their own land, Bennett shows precisely the same attitudes towards history and conquest as the Nazis and Communists under Stalin. He and Netanyahu are utterly disgraceful and should be thrown out of office. And the construction of further illegal settlements on the West Bank should stop immediately.

Neve Gordon on Netanyahu Scoring Own Goal in Embracing Anti-Semitic Zionists

Remember all those months ago when the Jewish Labour Movement and the Blairites in the Labour party had a collective feeding frenzy and went howling after ‘Red’ Ken, accusing him of being a terrible anti-Semite? Livingstone had committed the unutterable crime of trying to defend other members of the Labour party, falsely accused of anti-Semitism, by stating quite truthfully that Hitler had supported the Zionist movement.

This is quite true. Before embarking on the horrific ‘Final Solution’ the Nazis had as a way of creating a Judenrein Germany. The gave aid and support to people smugglers sending Jews covertly to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. And the Zionists themselves preferred Nazi persecution of their people, to tolerance and the patriotic Jewish groups fighting to stay in their homelands, like the Jewish ex-servicemen’s league in Germany. The Zionist leaders made monstrous pronouncements about preferring all of the Jews in Germany to suffer at the hands of the Nazis rather than half of them being saved if they found sanctuary in England, so long as some went to Israel.

All this is a matter of historic fact. You can find it in the history books, including those written by very pro-Zionist Jews. Yet it didn’t stop the cries of anti-Semitism, or John Mann doorstepping Livingstone to scream the accusation at him. And many histories of Fascism have pointed out that anti-Semites elsewhere, including Britain, were also Zionists through their determination to cleanse their countries of their Jewish population.

Behind all this raving Zionist hysteria is the determination of the Jewish lobby to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Israel is the Jewish state, and so, according to the Likudniks and the Israel lobby, any hostility to Israel can only be motivated by anti-Semitism. Even if the person criticising Israel is Jewish. Then they’re accused of self-hatred. And Jews and Gentiles alike have been accused of Jew-hatred, even when they are decent individuals without a racist, anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.

This was the reason Jackie Walker, the deputy chair of Momentum, was accused of anti-Semitism for her comments made at a day workshop in preparation for Holocaust Memorial Day. Walker had questioned the organisers’ definition of anti-Semitism, which explicitly conflated it with anti-Zionism. She also criticised it for the way it exclusively concentrated on the Holocaust, giving little, if any, mention of other genocides and crimes against humanity, such as slavery. Walker is half-Jewish herself, and her partner is Jewish. Her daughter attends a Jewish school. Her mother was a Black woman, deported from America for joining the Black American civil rights struggle. Her comments about Israel and the slave trade are part of a general debate amongst historians, scholars and anti-racist activists, including Jews. But that didn’t stop the Israel lobby demanding her head as a terrible anti-Semite.

Now it seems that Netanyahu and the other members of his Likud-led coalition cannot, by their own actions, accuse others of being anti-Semitic if they don’t equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, or even worse, remind the world that many anti-Semites were pro-Zionist. ‘Cause Netanyahu has now done the same himself. He has publicly embraced Trump’s cabinet, which includes two notorious anti-Semites, for the support Trump is going to give Israel.

Neve Gordon has written an excellent article about this in Friday’s Counterpunch.
It begins

In February, the Israeli prime minister praised the British government for introducing new guidelines prohibiting publicly funded bodies from boycotting Israeli products. ‘I want to commend the British government for refusing to discriminate against Israel and Israelis and I commend you for standing up for the one and only true democracy in the Middle East,’ Netanyahu said.

‘Modern anti-Semitism,’ he went on, ‘not only attacks individual Jews, but attacks them collectively, and the slanders that were hurled over centuries against the Jewish people are now hurled against the Jewish state.’

Progressive voices such as Jewish Voice for Peace have tried for years to counter the insidious conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but the identification may now be unravelling at last because of a forceful intervention from the right.

She then discusses Trump’s appointment of Steven Bannon and Jeff Sessions. Bannon was accused by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of putting anti-Semitic material on Breitbart, while Jeff Sessions is another White supremacist with a reputation for anti-Semitism. Sessions made distasteful joke sometime ago about thinking the KKK were all right, before he found out they smoked dope.

But now Netanyahu as embraced Trump, the hero of the racist, anti-Semitic Alt-Right. Netanyahu’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, happily sat next to Bannon last Sunday at a dinner organised by the Zionist Association of America. Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and a member of the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, praised Bannon, stating

‘I have known Steve to be a passionate Zionist and supporter of Israel who felt so strongly about this that he opened a Breitbart office in Israel to ensure that the true pro-Israel story would get out.’

Neve Gordon’s article rightly concludes

Israel’s leaders and their right-wing Jewish allies in the United States, in other words, have no problem stomaching anti-Semitism so long as the anti-Semite supports Zionism. But if an anti-Semite can be a Zionist then anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.

See http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/25/israels-new-friends/

This shows the amoral political utilitarianism and hypocrisy of the Israel lobby. With Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump and his foul cabinet, they no longer have any right whatsoever to accuse anyone of anti-Semitism simply because they criticise Israel and its decades of brutality towards the indigenous Palestinians. And they have just proved Livingstone to be right about Nazis supporting Zionism. They did during the Third Reich. And they’re doing so now, with the bland co-operation and blessing of the Likud.