Political Zionism: The Ideology of Jewish Self-Hatred--Part 5

So, what do these early Zionists have in common? They all blame the victim. They agree that the cause of anti-Semitism is the lack of a Jewish state. Herzl also mentions other material causes, but he comes around to that one. He and Pinsker clearly assert that Jews bring anti-Semitism with them wherever they go. Let's point out that anti-Semitism of the sort they were dealing with was a purely European phenomenon. Algeria was mentioned, but it was a French colony. Europeans exported it to some of their colonies. But this skewed European focus obscures the fact that there was nothing like that phenomenon anywhere else, including in the Turkish, Arab, and Persian countries of the Middle East even though there were very sizable Jewish populations in those countries. Second, they all agree that there is something called a Jewish people with origins in Palestine even though Pinsker states quite well the reasons that no such entity existed. On this point, I refer you to the excellent book, The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) by Shlomo Sand, who is a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv. Sand's entirely scholarly and well-sourced book shows that the vast majority of modern Jews descend from converts and that the mostly likely concentration of descendants of the ancient Hebrews who lived in ancient Israel is precisely among the modern Palestinians who first became Christians and then Muslims under foreign conquest. Thus political Zionism (we use that term to distinguish this largely secular movement from religious Zionism which prophesies the return of Jews to Palestine along with a messiah) is founded on at least two  premises easily shown to be false. Further, political Zionism, which these writings clearly demonstrate grew in the same soil as non-Jewish anti-Semitism, xenophobic nationalism, and fascism which culminated in the slaughters of Jews, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals, and many others during World War II, incorporated some of the same ideas into their ideology. The anti-Semites said that Jews did not belong in their home countries. The Zionists agreed with them. The anti-Semites promoted stereotypes about Jewish behavior; the Zionists said that there is truth to the stereotypes because Jews don't have their own nation. The testimony of these early Zionists confirms that the vast majority of Jews rejected their ideas and their project to colonize Palestine. They were considered crazy kooks. Why would a self-respecting Jew embrace an ideology which teaches her or him to hate him or herself and blames her or him for the acts of anti-Semites? Why would a self-loving Jew agree to leave instead of to fight? That is why I indict political Zionism as a form of racial discrimination as the United Nations once held; it is racism first and foremost against Jews. The project of the Zionist movement, which was to create an apartheid state in Palestine, leads to the second expression of racial discrimination, which aimed to remove the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine using a variety of actions which are clearly war crimes. The best book on that is Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe is another Israeli historian. There are many, many books on these subjects, but I will recommend one more if you can find it. Abram Leon, a Polish Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1944, wrote an excellent study The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. Leon presented some of the same material that Sand presents on Jewish history, but he also shows that anti-Semitism was a specifically European phenomenon derived from the role that Jewish moneylenders played under feudalism and then magnified by the collapse of feudalism in Eastern Europe.

So, the next time that a Zionist defender of Israel makes the anti-Semite or self-hating Jew attack, tell him or her to look inward. To be sure, there are still lots of non-Jewish anti-Semites in the world, but some of them are allies of Israel. (Consider the Argentinian regime which tortured Jacobo Timerman and was armed by Israel.)

Zionism is now a much more immediate threat to Jews and to the world than non-Jewish anti-Semitism. Just as African-Americans had to confront those who internalized racism, Jews have to confront Zionists and challenge all of the historically and morally decrepit elements of their ideology. And this is not only the responsibility of Jews but of all interested in justice, peace, and world survival.