First a short quiz.  Who said the following?

1. ‘the Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race - they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews less than their peculiar noses... reform, conversion, education and emancipation, none of these open the gates of society to the German Jew, hence his desire to deny his racial origins.’

2. The Jews possess a greater enterprising spirit and abilities than the average European, to say nothing about all those Asians and Africans.’

3. ‘Galut (Jewish exile) can only… sustain the existence of a people disfigured in both body and soul - in a word, of a horror. At the very worst it can maintain them in a state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature in an environment of disintegration of cultures and of darkening spiritual horizons. The result will be something neither Jewish nor Gentile - in any case, not a pure national type.... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.’

4. ‘In Paris a captain by the name of Dreyfus has been arrested on charges of spying; he is a Jew.  In Berlin a major usury trial is taking place.  Naturally the accused are Jews… perhaps the anti-Semites are right in their charges after all!… Even the gravest punishment is not too harsh for this Dreyfus, since not he alone but all the rest of us suffer for his guilt.!’

5. ‘An anti-Semitic teacher once said: “It is impossible to be too hard on the Jews.”  The man was pretty close to the truth.  Only ruthless rigor, only relentless denunciation can heal Judaism of its ills.’

Those who think that the above comments were made by Adolf Hitler, or Goebbels or Streicher or maybe Heinrich Class are wrong. 

All the above statements are made by Zionists. 

The answers are:

1. Moses Hess in Rome & Jerusalem cited in A. Hertzberg, Zionist Idea, p.120/121.

2. Max Nordau, Deputy President of the World Zionist Organisation in ‘Max Nordau talks to his people’, New York, 1941. p. 73.

3. Jacob Klatzkin, cited in A. Hertzberg, op. cit., p. 322/323.

4. Arthur Ruppin in Diary November 4 and December 23 1894, A Ruppin cited in Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism:  Parallels and Influences (1883-1914), Joachim Doron, Studies in Zionism, No. 8, August 1983.

5. Ibid., Rudolph Lothar, Die Welt, Zionist official newspaper, no. 3 1897, p.14. “Antisemitische Karikaturen.”

In order to disguise their origins, I have changed the first person to the third person in some of the quotes above, but otherwise they are exactly the same as the originals.  Nor are these quotes particularly exceptional.  They come from some of the key historical figures in the Zionist movement, including the WZO’s deputy President, Max Nordau and the person who headed the Palestine Office of the World Jewish Agency, Arthur Ruppin, a man who devoted his life to the establishment of Zionist settlements and colonies in Palestine.

What then is Zionism and is it the same as being Jewish?  When Israel claims that its actions are on behalf of all Jews and when the BNP claim that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist, are they correct?

Zionism was a political movement, founded in the late 19th Century with one aim – the establishment of a Jewish State.  That was the title of the first pamphlet Der Judenstaat of the founder of modern Political Zionism, Theodore Herzl.

Zionism held that the longing to ‘return’ was a constant in the 2,000 year ‘exile’ of Jews from Palestine.  It is strange that it was only in the late colonial era that Jews moved to Palestine in any numbers.  In fact Zionism, as a settler colonial movement, chimed with the times.  It sought, as Herzl put it in Der Judenstaat,, to ‘form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’

Zionism was primarily a reaction to anti-Semitism.  After the assassination of  Czar Alexander II in 1881 there followed a series of bloody pogroms in Kiev and Odessa.  Hundreds of Jews lost their lives. Zionism, which had largely been the dream of Romantic imperialists and Jewish mystics, now began to be adopted by a section of the Jewish middle classes.  Zionism was, however, a unique reaction of a tiny minority of Jews.  It held that anti-Semitism was caused by Jews being strangers in the lands of non-Jews.  That until they ‘returned’ to Palestine, anti-Semitism would triumph.  The vast majority of Jews rejected Zionism.  Many joined the socialist and revolutionary movements to fight anti-Semitism or they emigrated.  Over 2 million emigrated between the 1880’s and 1914 to the United States.  Something like 3% of Jewish emigrants went to Palestine.

Zionism held that anti-Semitism could not be fought, that it was inherent in the non-Jew.  But they also recognised, in Herzl’s metaphor, that anti-Semitism was the ‘propellant’, that it would provide Zionism with the ‘requisite impetus.’ (Jewish State, pp.7, 57).  The founders of Zionism immediately recognised that without anti-Semitism there would be no Zionism.  This is why Herzl argued that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’  (Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, pp. 83-4).   The anti-Semites too recognised that the Zionists were their ideological soul mates.  Even during the Nazi period, the Zionists were treated more favourably than any other group within the Jewish population.  As the introduction to the infamous Nuremburg race laws of 1935 stated:

‘The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremburg Laws because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too.’  (Die Nurnberger Gesetze, 5 Auflage Berline, pp. 13/14. Khamsin No. 6, p.38.

Lucy Dawidowicz, a right-wing Zionist historian describes in her ‘War Against the Jews 1933-45’ how Reinhardt Heydrich, described as the engineer of the final solution by Reitlinger, argued that Zionist youth organisations ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists)…. On 15 May 1935 the Schwarze Korps, official organ of the SS, supported this policy as the correct ideological posture for National Socialists.  The Jews, it was argued, had to be separated into two categories – Zionists and assimiliationists:  ‘the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.’ (p.118)

This was why the first Zionist Congress of 1897 was held in Basle, Switzerland. In Munich, where it was originally scheduled to be held, the Jewish community had strongly objected to its presence.  The Zionists were seen as Jewish anti-Semites.  It also explains why the only member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet to object to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which promised the land of Palestine to the Zionists, was its sole Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who accused his fellow cabinet members of anti-Semitism!

As Isaac Deutscher explained:

“It should be remembered that the great majority of East European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second world war, opposed to Zionism... The most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from East Europe to Palestine... To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out’. The Zionists were agreeing to get out. (‘The Non-Jewish Jew & Other Essays - The Russian Revolution and the Jewish Question.’ pp. 66/67).

And that is why anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish racism is the best friend of Zionism.  Indeed the lack of anti-Semitism in the West today is a real problem for the Zionists.  Because without anti-Semitism there is little or no emigration to Israel.  Indeed there are more Jews leaving than entering Israel, hence the nonsense of the recent All-Parliamentary Report into Anti-Semitism, which New Labour has fully endorsed.    As  Nahum Goldmann, former President of the World Zionist Organisation put it:

‘The danger represented to the survival of the Jewish people by the integration of Jewish communities into the peoples among whom they live is greater than that constituted by external threats of anti-Semitism’

Hence why the supporters of Israel have to invent ‘anti-Semitism’.  Accordingly the ‘new anti-Semitism’ as endorsed by New Labour and the European Union Monitoring Committee, consists of criticism of the nature of the Israeli state, i.e. anti-Zionism.  This is why supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism have to make a clear distinction between Zionism and anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism and Zionism are two sides of the same coin.  It is no surprise that the BNP supported the Israeli attack on Muslims in the Lebanon last summer. 

It is also no surprise that reactionary Arab regimes such Saudi Arabia use anti-Semitic ideas to give themselves legitimacy.  The holding of a conference in Tehran on Holocaust denial did nothing but damage to the Palestinian cause.  Because Zionism claims that the Holocaust justifies the existence of the Israeli state, then there are those who believe that if they can ‘prove’ there was no Holocaust then Israel will lose its justification for existing!  Now there are many reasons for opposing the Israeli state, but Holocaust denial is not one of them.  And by this same ‘logic’ if the Holocaust is proved to have happened, then one has to accept the Israeli state.

To argue that there was no Holocaust is like arguing that the Earth is flat.  The Holocaust is as much a historical fact as the slave trade or the genocide of the Armenians.  Leave aside the scientific evidence, the testimony of thousands of survivors.  Ask why none of the Nazi defendants in the 1946 Nuremburg trials chose to deny what had happened.  Neither Streicher, nor Rosenberg or Sauckel or Kaltenbrunner pretended there was no Holocaust.  Instead they tried to blame each other or Hitler.  Ask why the person who headed the SS Jewish Department, Adolph Eichmann, in an interview with a Dutch Nazi journalist in 1955, reprinted in Life Magazine of 28.11.60 and 5.12.60, five years before he was captured by Israel, boasted of his having organised the deportations and exterminations.  Why Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz claimed that 2.5 million Jews died there in the gas chambers (probably an overestimate) or why David Irving, the only serious historian the Holocaust Revisionists have ever had, was forced to admit in the ill-fated libel action he brought against Penguin Books that millions of Jews were exterminated.

There is no contradiction between opposing anti-Semitism and opposing the racist Israeli state and what it does to the Palestinians.  The obsession with the ‘demographic problem’ in Israel (i.e. too many Arabs) mirrors similar obsessions in Germany in the 1930’s about too many Jews.  As the Zionist novelist A B Yehoshua noted in a speech to the Union of Jewish Students (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.):

‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’

Tony Greenstein

Tony Greenstein was a founder member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and has written extensively on Zionism.

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