By Joseph Massad*
Ever since the inception of the Zionist movement, Zionist thinkers presented
their national colonial project as a response to antiSemitism. Whereas Zionists
saw antiSemitism as a symptom, if not a diagnosis, of the Jewish Question, they
offered Zionism as the final cure that would eradicate antiSemitism in Europe
once and for all.
Herzl and his followers
insisted that it is the presence of Jews in gentile societies that caused
antiSemitism. Herzl put it thus in his foundational Zionist pamphlet Der
Judenstaat: "The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of antiSemitism
into England; they have already introduced it into America."
Sharing this diagnosis with antiSemites, the Zionists called for the exit of
Jews from gentile societies in order to "normalise" their "abnormal" situation,
transforming them into a Ever since the inception of the Zionist movement,
Zionist thinkers presented their national colonial project as a response to
antiSemitism. Whereas Zionists saw antiSemitism as a symptom, if not a
diagnosis, of the Jewish Question, they offered Zionism as the final cure that
would eradicate antiSemitism in Europe once and for all.
Herzl and his followers insisted that it is the presence of Jews in gentile
societies that caused antiSemitism. Herzl put it thus in his foundational
Zionist pamphlet Der Judenstaat: "The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the
seeds of antiSemitism into England; they have already introduced it into
America."
Sharing this diagnosis with antiSemites, the Zionists called for the exit of
Jews from gentile societies in order to "normalise" their "abnormal" situation,
transforming them into a nation like other nations.
Zionism could only be realised through a colonialsettler project, which its
founders understood was achievable only through an alliance with colonial
powers. Whereas the colonisation of Palestine would start late, on the eve of
the eclipse of European colonialism, Zionism would thrive in its early years
precisely because both antiSemitism and colonialism were de rigueur in late
19th and early 20th century Europe.
In its early years, Jewish Zionism along with its European Christian sponsors
would invoke the millenarian Protestant affirmation that European Jews were
linked historically and geographically to Palestine to which they should
"return". Palestinian opposition to Jewish colonisation would be cast as native
fanatical resistance to European rule, as well as an affront to Jewish and
Christian claims of Palestine as a "national home" for European Jews.
Statesponsored antiSemitism
Statesponsored antiSemitism would prove most helpful to Zionism. Indeed, Zionist leaders consciously recognised that state antiSemitism was essential to their colonial project. Herzl did not mince words about this. He would declare in his foundational pamphlet that "the Governments of all countries scourged by AntiSemitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want"; and indeed that not "only poor Jews" would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, "but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them".
Herzl would conclude in his Diaries that "the antiSemites will become our most
dependable friends, the antiSemitic countries our allies". These were not slips
or errors but indeed a longterm strategy that Zionism and Israel continue to
deploy to this very day.
That Arthur Balfour was a wellknown Protestant antiSemite who in 1905
sponsored a bill (The Aliens Act) to prevent East European Jews fleeing pogroms
from immigrating to England was not incidental to the fact that the Zionists
rushed to court him, let alone to his own support of the Zionist project through
the "Balfour Declaration", which would reroute Jews away from England. When the
Nazis took over power in Germany, the Zionists, sharing Herzl's understanding
that antiSemitism is the ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group who would
collaborate with them. In fact, contra all other German Jews (and everyone else
inside and outside Germany) who recognised Nazism as the Jews' bitterest enemy,
Zionism saw an opportunity to strengthen its colonisation of Palestine.
In 1933, Labour Zionism signed the Transfer "Ha'avara" Agreement with the Nazis,
breaking the international boycott against the regime: Nazi Germany would
compensate German Jews who emigrate to Palestine for their lost property by
exporting German goods to the Zionists in the country thus breaking the boycott.
Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested in Jewish Palestine
came from German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement. Thus, Nazism was a
boon to Zionism throughout the 1930s.
In 1935, the German Zionist branch was the only political force that supported
the Nazi Nuremberg Laws in the country, and was the only party still allowed to
publish its own newspaper the Rundschau until after Kristallnacht in 1938. Nazi
officials would visit Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937.
In the latter year, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen who
arrived in the country. The two were taken by the Zionist envoy Feivel Polkes to
Mount Carmel to visit a Jewish colonialsettlement. Eichmann's second arrival in
the country in the early 60s to be tried and executed was indeed his second
visit, something Israeli propaganda always forgets to mention. Yet Zionism would
always claim that its collaboration with antiSemitism was strategic, namely to
save Jews.
This however does not square with the facts that during Nazi rule, Jews from
Britain and the United States were given priority by the Zionists over German
Jews for immigration to Palestine. Indeed, twothirds of German Jewish
applicants to immigrate to Palestine were turned down by the Zionists, whose
criteria for the ideal immigrant was a Jew's commitment to Zionism, youth, good
health, training, wealth, needed skills and knowledge of Hebrew.
The world after World War II
As statesponsored antiSemitism disappeared with the defeat of the Nazis and
the horrors of the Nazi holocaust became known, Zionists sought to conceal much
of their history of collaboration with antiSemitic movements and regimes. Yet
the disappearance of state antiSemitism created a dilemma for the Zionist
project. If Zionism considers itself a response to antiSemitic threats against
Jews, with the end of state antiSemitism Zionism's raison d'être would be in
jeopardy, as Jews would not be convinced of the need to move to the new state of
Israel. Moreover, as antiSemitism came to be rejected by the postWorld War II
world, so was colonialism. As the colonial age was ending and a postcolonial
world of independent states was emerging, colonialism like antiSemitism was
thoroughly delegitimised in international relations and in European parlance.
This transformation placed Zionism in a quandary. Zionism could only proceed
with more colonisation of Palestinian land, yet, recognising the increasing
hostility to colonialism, it began to present its colonial project as
anticolonial struggle. As its British sponsors had to retreat and limit their
support for the Zionist project since the beginning of World War II, rightwing
Zionists turned against them.
Launching terrorist attacks against the British forces, the Jewish colonists
were adamant that Britain had betrayed them. In the period between 1944 and 1948
Jewish terrorism and the British response to it led to the killing of 44 Jewish
terrorists and 170 British soldiers and civilians, a ratio of 4 to 1 in favour
of the terrorists. Unlike other anticolonial struggles where the casualty
figures would be astronomically in favour of the colonisers, Zionism would begin
to call its terrorist war against Britain a "war of independence", casting
itself as anticolonial movement.
Now that Zionists began to recode their colonial project as "anticolonial"
while proceeding with colonisation, they understood that they could capitalise
on the recent hostility to antiSemitism in European public opinion. As the
Palestinian people mounted their resistance to Jewish colonisation year after
year, and decade after decade, Zionism began to fight them by labelling them
antiSemites.
Indeed, it was then that any call for the end of Zionist colonisation would be
confronted with the argument of antiSemitism. Israel decided then that if state
antiSemitism did not exist, it must be conjured up, if attacks on Jews qua Jews
did not exist, they must be engineered, if an antiSemitic attitude could be
discerned, it must be capitalised on, generalised and exaggerated. For the only
defence Israel could mount in the new world that was opposed to both colonialism
and antiSemitism was to use one in defence of the other.
Zionism would begin to rewrite the Palestinian struggle against Jewish
colonisation not as an anticolonial struggle but as an antiSemitic project.
The story of the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin alHusseini would become Exhibit A
in the Zionist version of Palestinian history. Despairing from convincing
Britain to stop its support of the Zionist colonial project and horrified by the
ZionistNazi collaboration that strengthened the Zionist theft of Palestine
further, the Palestinian elitist and conservative leader Haj Amin alHusseini
(who opposed the Palestinian peasant revolt of 1936 against Zionist
colonization) sought relations with the Nazis to convince them to halt their
support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, which they had promoted through the
Transfer Agreement with the Zionists in 1933.
It was the very same Zionist collaborators with the Nazis who would later vilify
alHusseini, beginning in the 1950s to the present, as a Hitlerite of genocidal
proportions, even though his limited role ended up being one of propagandising
on behalf of the Nazis to East European and Soviet Muslims on the radio.
Nonetheless, whenever the question of Jewish colonisation was raised by the
Palestinians, the Zionist response would be to insist invariably that Jewish
colonisation was the only way to end antiSemitism and protect Jews, and that
any and all opposition to Jewish colonisation of Palestine was nothing short of
a continuation of antiSemitism. Israel began to insist that any talk of
colonisation of Palestinian land was nothing short of a distraction from
antiSemitism targeting Jews.
In light of the new postwar period that saw the end of statesponsored
antiSemitism, the Zionists set out to attack Jews in a number of countries and
to conjure up the spectre of antiSemitism in countries that opposed Zionism. In
Iraq, the Israeli Mossad planted bombs in synagogues, libraries and cafes in the
early 1950s, which killed and injured Iraqi Jews and spread panic amongst them
that Iraqi Muslims and Christians were targeting them. Collaboration ensued
between Israel and the Britishsponsored Iraqi regime to bring about the exodus
of Iraqi Jews to Israel.
When Egyptian Jews still refused to go to Israel, the Mossad again placed bombs
in Egyptian cinemas, train stations and post offices. When the Egyptian
authorities uncovered the terrorist operation, later made famous under the name
the "Lavon Affair", and its Jewish perpetrators were captured and tried, Israel
launched a major propaganda campaign claiming that Nasser was "Hitler on the
Nile".
In the postStalin Soviet Union, which unlike its Stalinist predecessor, opposed
Zionism, and where all Soviet citizens were not allowed to emigrate, a major
Cold War Israeli and US propaganda campaign insisted that the Soviets were
antiSemites. The Americans and the Israelis arranged to grant Soviet Jews
special privileges over other Soviet citizens by forcing the Soviet government
to grant them emigration visas.
Those Soviet Jews who left did so for economic reasons and as such went (to
Israel's chagrin) to the United States, a situation that forced Israel later to
collaborate with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to reroute them to
Israel forcibly. Indeed, the Israelis would later try to introduce legislation
in the US to prevent their emigration to the United States, which indeed would
close off its borders to them after the USSR fell. This would force many Soviet
Jews (a majority of whom turned out to be Soviet nonJews who pretended to be
Jewish) to go to Israel as economic refugees in the 1990s.
The postSoviet world
Israel and Zionism have been in deep mourning over the passing of actual antiSemitic regimes and of regimes that they could cast in that role, as these regimes had provided them with so much propaganda power to justify their colonial project. After the fall of the USSR, the Zionists ran out of arguments and of regimes they could label "antiSemitic". In this new situation, Israeli propaganda would become outright hysterical. Attempting to cast some of the antiZionist pronouncements of the Iranian President Ahmadinejad as genocidal antiSemitism, Israel is hoping it could cover up its ongoing colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In case this did not work, the Israeli embassy in Dublin last week summoned the
supernatural powers of Jesus Christ to help cover up Zionist colonialism. In a
Christmas Message to the Irish people on its official Facebook page, the embassy
announced that the Palestinians would probably "lynch" Jesus and his mother Mary
in Bethlehem today had they been alive as "Jews without security", hence the
need for Israel to continue to colonise Palestinian land while ensuring the
security of its Jewish colonial settlers.
Indeed Binyamin Netanyahu argued in his UN speech last year that Palestinian
resistance to Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is
itself antiSemitic. He even compared Palestinian Authority laws criminalising
collaboration with Jewish colonisation as akin to the Nuremberg Laws: "There are
laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by
death. That's racism. And you know which laws this evokes." Netanyahu seems to
have forgotten that it was the Zionists, not the Palestinians, who abetted the
Nazis in 1935 when they supported the Nuremberg Laws.
Palestinians understood well these arguments and always insisted and insist that
their struggle is against Jewish colonisation of their lands and not against
Jews qua Jews. When Khaled Meshal arrived in Gaza a couple of weeks ago and made
a speech to that effect, he insisted: "We do not fight the Jews because they are
Jews. We fight the Zionist occupiers and aggressors. And we will fight anyone
who tries to occupy our lands or attacks us."
The British Observer mistranslated his speech as: "We don't kill Jews because
they are Jews. We kill the Zionists because they are conquerors and we will
continue to kill anyone who takes our land and our holy places." While the
Observer would later run a correction after the tireless Ali Abunimah exposed
the doctored quotes, its mistranslation was in line with Zionist propaganda.
Herzl's strategy continues to be the strategy of Zionism and the State of
Israel. Whereas statesponsored antiSemitism has disappeared, Israel must
create it and conjure it up, as this is its major line of defence against any
and all international criticisms and censure of its ongoing colonisation of
Palestine.
While the four permanent members of the UN Security Council censured Israel last
week for its plans to expand yet again its colonial settlements in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem, the US will surely veto a possible UN Security Council
resolution condemning these colonial activities. Should this happen, we will
immediately hear the Israeli and pro-Israeli chorus of condemnation of the
international body as "antiSemitic" yet again.
That this strategy has now run its course and no longer intimidates
international actors has led to much panic in Zionist and Israeli circles.
Israel and Zionism now understand well that when the world, including the United
States (excepting Barack Obama), hears "antiSemitism" as an argument to defend
Israel, they understand it as an Israeli diversionary tactic to distract the
world from Israeli Jewish colonialism and colonialsettlements on Palestinian
land.
Make no mistake about it, antiSemitism in Israeli discourse is and has been
nothing short of camouflage for the continuation of Jewish colonisation of
Palestine. Only the gullible continue to be fooled.
* Joseph Massad is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question
published by Routledge.
Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at
Columbia University.
Source: Al Jazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212249122912381.html
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