Israel: The Anti-Jewish State

I have covered this theme before, but now I am looking at it from a slightly different angle and a profoundly Jewish angle. Israel claims to be the state of the Jews, the state of the "Jewish people." But how could such a state, even if there were such an entity as the Jewish people, be founded on an ideology which is profoundly racist against Jews. A state for Jews would have used its resources to help Jews in Argentina. Israel armed the anti-Jewish regime. A pro-Jewish movement would have used its resources to help European Jews to escape from fascism during World War II. The Zionist movement refused to do so. Let us remember that Zionism was born in Europe in the 19th century amidst a swirl of political movements ranging from socialism to the most perverted forms of racist nationalism. The Zionists had nothing in common with the socialists. To be sure, they represented a range of views, from the unapologetic fascists of Jabotinsky to the pro-Imperialists like Weizmann and Ben Gurion. But what they agreed on was that Jews did not belong in Europe, should leave, and create their own state. In other words, they internalized the program of the European anti-Semites,  made it their own, and called it Jewish. But that is a profoundly anti-Jewish program, an assault on Jewish self-respect and integrity. It is hardly surprising that such a movement did not draw many supporters, especially in the United States, where most Jews saw Zionists as crazy. A history of the Zionist movement in the United States praised Justice Brandeis for keeping the movement going when nobody would support it. The Zionists fought to establish a foothold in the rabbinical seminaries of the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not even manage to garner significant Jewish support in 1948. Ironically, it was Israel's war of aggression in 1967 which engendered the first significant support from American Jews and, much more importantly, from the US government. There are many signs that American Jewish support for Israel is in steep decline. I doubt that this results from a full or conscious understanding of the deeply anti-Jewish basis of the Israeli state, but I would not be surprised if there is a subtle psychological rejection of Israel's blatant identification with everything Jews learned to despise during centuries of persecution in Europe. The psychosis of 1967 has begun to heal, and let us hope that an awakening about the anti-Jewish nature of Israel will occur.