Anti-Semitism
Notes
on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Palestine
By Tariq
Ali
Originally published in il manifesto 26 Febbraio 2004.
Anti-Semitism is a racist ideology directed against the Jews. It
has old roots. In his classic work, The Jewish Question, A Marxist
Interpretation,
that was published posthumously in France in 1946, the Belgian
Marxist, Abram Leon, (active in the resistance during the Second
World War, he was captured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944)
invented the category of a 'people-class' for the role of the Jews
who managed to preserve their linguistic, ethnic and religious
characteristics through many centuries without becoming
assimilated. This was not unique to the Jews, but could apply just
as strongly to many ethnic minorities: diaspora Armenians, Copts,
Chinese merchants in South East Asia, Muslims in China, etc. The
defining characteristic common to these groups is that they became
middlemen in a pre-capitalist world, resented alike by rich and
poor.
Twentieth century anti-Semitism, usually instigated from above by
priests (Russia, Poland), politicians/intellectuals (Germany,
France and, after 1938, big business (USA, Britain), played on the
fears and insecurity of a deprived population. Hence August Bebel's
reference to anti-Semitism as 'the socialism of fools'. The roots
of anti-Semitism like other forms of racism are social, political,
ideological and economic. The judeocide of the Second World War,
carried out by the political-military-industrial complex of German
imperialism, was one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century,
but not the only one. The Belgian massacres in the Congo had led to
between 10-12 million deaths before the First World War. The
uniqueness of the judeocide was that it took place in Europe (the
heart of Christian civilization) and was carried out
systematically---
by Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, French and Italians---
as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Hence Hannah
Arendt's phrase, 'the banality of evil.' Since the end of the
Second World War popular anti-Semitism of the old variety declined
in Western Europe, restricted largely to remnants of fascist or
neo-fascist organisations.
In Poland, a country where virtually all the Jews were killed, it
remained strong, as it did in Hungary. In the Arab world there were
well-integrated Jewish minorities in Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus.
They did not suffer at the time of the European judeocide.
Historically, Muslims and Jews have been much closer to each other
than either to Christianity. Even after 1948 when tensions rose
between the two communities throughout the Arab east it was Zionist
provocations, such as the bombing of Jewish cafes in Baghdad that
helped to drive Arab Jews out of their native countries into
Israel.
Non-Jewish Zionism has an old pedigree and permeates European
culture. It dates back to the birth of Christian fundamentalist
sects of the 16th and 17th centuries who took the Old Testament
literally. They included Oliver Cromwell and John Milton. Later,
for other reasons, Rousseau, Locke and Pascal joined the Zionist
bandwagon. And then for vile reasons the Third Reich, too,
supported a Jewish homeland. The introduction to the Nuremburg Laws
of 15 September 1935 state:
"If the
Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of the people were
at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved
today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all
people have objected least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg
Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct
solution for the Jewish people."
Many years later, Haim Cohen, a former judge of the Supreme Court
of Israel stated: "The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same
biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which
inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for
the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of
Israel" (quoted in Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of
Israel NY, 1960, P.156)
And Zionist leaders often negotiated with anti-Semites to attain
their objectives: Theodor Herzl talked openly with Von Plehve, the
chief organiser of pogroms in Tsarist Russia; Jabotinsky
collaborated with Petlura the Ukrainian hangman of the Jews;
'revisionist' Zionists were friendly with Mussolini and Pilsudski;
the Haavara agreements between the Zionist organisations and the
Third Reich agreed to the evacuation of German-Jewish
property.
Modern zionism is the ideology of secular Jewish nationalism. It
has little to do with Judaism as a religion and many orthodox Jews
to this day have remained hostile to Zionism, like the Hassidic
sect which joined a Palestinian march in Washington in April 2002
carrying placards which said: "ZIONISM SUCKS" and "SHARON:
PALESTINIAN BLOOD IS NOT WATER". Zionism was born in the 19th
Century as a direct response to the vicious anti-Semitism that
pervaded Austria. The first Jewish immigrants to Palestine arrived
in 1882 and many of them were interested only in maintaining a
cultural presence. There is no such thing as the 'historical
rights' of Jews to Palestine. This grotesque myth (already in the
17th century, Baruch Spinoza referred to the old testament as ' a
collection of fairy-tales', denounced the prophets and was
excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue as a result) ignores real
history. Long before the Roman conquest of Judea in 70 AD, a large
majority of the Jewish population lived outside Palestine. The
native Jews were gradually assimilated into neighbouring groups
such as the Phoenicians, Philistines, etc. Palestinians are, in
most cases, descended from the old Hebrew tribes and genetic
science has recently confirmed this, much to the annoyance of
Zionists.
Israel was created in 1948 by the British Empire and sustained by
its American successor. It was a European settler-state. Its early
leaders proclaimed the myth of a 'A Land without People for a
People without Land', thus denying the presence of the
Palestinians. Four weeks ago the Zionist historian Benny Morris in
a chilling interview with Haaretz (reprinted as a document in
English in the New Left Review, Mar/Apr 2004) admitted the whole
truth. 700,000 Palestinians had been driven out of their villages
by the Zionist army in 1948. There were numerous incidents of rape,
etc. He described it accurately as 'ethnic cleansing' not genocide
and went on to defend ethnic cleansing if carried out by a superior
civilization, comparing it to the killing of native Americans by
the European settlers in North America. That too, for Morris, was
justified. Anti-Semites and Zionists shared one thing in common:
the view that Jews were a special race that could not be integrated
in European societies and needed its own large ghetto or homeland.
The fact that this is false is proved by the realities of today.
The majority of the world's Jews do not live in Israel, but in
Western Europe and North America.
Anti-Zionism was a struggle that began against the Zionist
colonisation project and intellectuals of Jewish origin played an
important part in this campaign and do so to this day inside Israel
itself. Most of my knowledge of Zionism and anti-Zionism comes from
the writings and speeches of anti-Zionist jews: Akiva Orr, Moshe
Machover, Haim Hanegbi, Isaac Deutscher, Ygael Gluckstein (Tony
Cliff), Ernest Mandel, Maxime Rodinson, Nathan Weinstock, to name
but a few. They argued that Zionism and the structures of the
Jewish state offered no real future to the Jewish people settled in
Israel. All they offered was infinite war. After 1967, there was a
revival of the Palestinian national movement and many different
groups arose, most of whom were careful to distinguish between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Nonetheless the role played by
Israel undoubtedly fuelled popular anti-Semitism in the Arab world.
But these are not old roots and a sovereign Palestinian homeland or
a democratic single state would soon bring this to an end.
Historically, there have been very few clashes between Jews and
Muslims in the Arab Empires.
The campaign against the supposed new 'anti-Semitism' in Europe
today is basically a cynical ploy on the part of the Israeli
Government to seal off the Zionist state from any criticism of its
regular and consistent brutality against the Palestinians. The
daily hits carried out by the IDF have wrecked the towns and
villages of Palestine, killed thousands of civilians (especially
children) and European citizens are aware of this fact. Criticism
of Israel can not and should not be equated with anti-Semitism. The
fact is that Israel is not a weak, defenceless state. It is the
strongest state in the region. It possesses real, not imaginary,
weapons of mass destruction. It possesses more tanks and bomber
jets and pilots than the rest of the Arab world put together. To
say that the Zionist state is threatened by any Arab country is
pure demagogy. It is Israel that creates the conditions, which
produce suicide bombers. Even a few staunch Zionists are beginning
to realise that this is a fact.. That is why we know that as long
as Palestine remains oppressed there will be no peace in the
region.
The daily suffering of the Palestinians does not excite the liberal
conscience of Europe, guilt-ridden (and for good reason) by its
past inability to defend the Jews of central Europe against
extinction. But the judeocide should not be used as a cover to
commit crimes against the Palestinian people. European and American
voices should be heard loud and clear on this question. To be
intimidated by Zionist blackmail is to become an accomplice of
war-crimes.
