Memories of Kentucky fiddler Clyde Davenport

I just got word from Bobby Fulcher today that Clyde is close to death. I want to put down my memories of Clyde to help remember him.

I first encountered Clyde in 1992 at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington. Clyde was wearing a sort of silver hat, and somebody stole it (he got it back before leaving for home). I recall Clyde walking around and asking, "Have you seen my hat?" He asked lots of people, including me. That year, the folks in his band lab made tin foil Clyde hats and wore them on stage. I think I saw Clyde at Fiddle tunes at least a couple of times after that. I recall asking Judy Hyman where a tune she played ("Old-Time Blackberry Blossom") was from. She said she didn't know. A few minutes later, I saw Clyde in a jam playing that tune. I asked him who it was from. He said that he had learned it from Dick Burnett. Clyde and Burnett were both from Monticello, Kentucky, and Clyde learned a lot from the duo of Burnett and (Enoch) Rutherford. Sure enough, I had a CD of Burnett and Rutherford at home, and it was one of the two tunes that Burnett fiddled.

In 1996, Clyde was in Port Townsend again. On the previous trip, Clyde had played a lovely fiddler that he had built himself. This time, he had a fiddle which had had a big crack on the top. He cut out a big rectangle of wood and replaced it with another kind of wood. I asked him why he had brought that one. He told me that he felt his fiddling wasn't as good as it used to be. I took that as a subtle message from him that he didn't want to keep playing out as much. That was the year that I started fiddling, and I saw Clyde sitting on the grass with another member of my beginning fiddle class with Greg Canote. It looked to me as if they were making a trade, and I tried to hint to her to be careful. She went ahead and traded her $700 fiddle for Clyde's. People tell me that Clyde loved to trade, and people often got great instruments from him that way. However, she came to me in tears that evening and said that she hated Clyde's fiddle. We found Bobby Fulcher, and he persuaded Clyde to trade back.

Bobby always accompanied Clyde to Fiddle Tunes and generally helped him with his workshops. Bob would ask Clyde to play a tune, and Clyde pretended that he didn't know it but eventually played it reluctantly. One day, Bob wasn't there and Candy Goldman filled in. Everything Candy asked Clyde to play he played with no issues. I asked him about it later. He said, "Bobby always gives me a hard time so I give him a hard time." I have to emphasize that it was like a comedy act. When Bob first met Clyde, he was traveling around looking for old fiddlers in Clyde's area. Bob would ask about local fiddlers and people kept sending him to Clyde's basement fiddle shop in downtown Monticello. Clyde would tell Bobby that he didn't fiddle and send him off to someone who could barely fiddle, who would ask whether he had listened to Clyde Davenport. Finally, on his fourth visit, Clyde played for Bobby.

Clyde played banjo on two LPs (I think on CD now) with fiddler W. L. Gregory. In the liner notes of one of the LPs, it says something like this: "Mr. Davenport also fiddles, but in a very modern style." Anybody who has listened to Clyde play would scratch their heads about that. Clyde had mostly stopped playing the banjo when I first saw him, though I did see him play "The Old Cow Died on the Forks of the Branch" once. I asked Clyde why he had stopped, and he said that he couldn't play as well as he used to. He also told me he had been in an industrial accident when he was younger and injured his right wrist. He said he had a much more flexible wrist before that.

I also saw Clyde a few times at Breaking Up Winter in Cedars of Lebanon State Park in Tennessee. Once he fiddled a tune with a name something like "My Old Grey Beard's a Flappin'." My friend Jim Nelson had given me a tape he made at Clyde's home in which Clyde sang the words. I asked Clyde why he hadn't sung the words. He said there were too many. I opined that there weren't that many. So, Clyde proceeded to sing all the words to me.

My friend Buddy Ingram made a one-hour film about Clyde (available on youtube). In the film, Clyde first comments that he doesn't really like to play and is only playing because of his visitors. But 5 minutes later, Clyde finishes a tune, smiles, and says, "Isn't that pretty?" Those are both authentic Clyde.

Who is Most to Blame for Donald Trump's Presidency?

There are many people we can point to whose careers helped elect Donald Trump: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, Hilary Clinton, etc. But Barack Obama must accept the largest share of the responsibility for his election.

Obama clearly ran posing as a progressive and was elected twice for that reason, but he was not progressive at all in many areas. Some will argue that Republicans controlled the House and Senate in his last six years, and that is certainly true, but Obama himself made the decisions that caused that to happen and which caused millions of voters to go for Trump in 2016.

Even before he was elected, when the proposal to bail out banks and other large financial institutions was failing to pass the House, Obama flew back to DC from the campaign trail to successfully lobby the Congressional Black Caucus to change their votes. I remember a feeling of total outrage at the time because a candidate who claimed to want to make things better was doing the opposite.

Then, immediately after his inauguration, he chose three Wall Street Neo-Liberals to run the US economy. They could have tried to bail out families suffering from the mortgage crisis, but they refused to do so. He and his attorney general refused to prosecute financial criminals who were directly responsible for the 2008 crash and who caused tremendous suffering to millions of people. They also refused to prosecute the CIA torturers, one of whom now leads the CIA. Obama began drone assassinations. Obama deported large numbers of immigrants. He continually tried to make deals with Republicans and always moved toward their positions. For all these and other related reasons (I could go on at great length about foreign policy outrages in Honduras, Libya, etc.), his party lost control of Congress.

Millions of working class voters, who had lost their jobs and who had zero opportunities to find new decent ones, felt betrayed, and justifiably so. Along comes Hilary Clinton, with the same policies (and even more hawkish on pursuing imperial wars) and lacking Obama's charisma. Trump pretends to be the savior of the working class, and those millions believe him. He unites the extreme right and parlays that to electoral college victory.

Those voters still have those grievances; Trump has not benefitted them at all. They can be won back by a candidate, such as Bernie Sanders, who makes a clean break with decades of Democratic Neo-Liberalism, which includes Obama. They will not vote for the latest darling of Neo-Liberalism, whether that is Biden, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg. That means that those candidates likely cannot win the swing states needed to win the Electoral College.

All that is why I point the finger without hesitation at Barack Obama for being the single person most responsible for the election of Donald Trump. That is the rotten fruit of the lesser evil strategy, and it is time to abandon that strategy for the complete failure it has produced.

The Capitalist Fetish for "Free" Markets

Markets have never been free in the history of capitalism. Someone always has an advantage, often unfair, and is able to distort the market in their own favor. In modern times with the massive growth of powerful corporations and the tremendous wealth and income concentrated in a small number of hands, markets are even less free and more unfair to most of us. What capitalists, and certainly libertarians, mean by free markets are markets free from government regulation or intervention. We have had a few centuries experience with such markets, and they produce tremendous inequities, health dangers, and frequent periodic crises, which we now call recessions, depressions, or crashes. From unregulated markets, we got child labor, crippling injuries, unsafe commodities, tremendous fraud, and much more.

Effective government regulation is fairly recent and is always accompanied by more prosperity for more people. In the USA, we got the food and drug act to inspect food under Teddy Roosevelt, and we got regulation of banking and more under Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures our bank deposits. Medicare ensures that older people get medical care at a reasonable cost.

Starting around 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, many regulations began to be rolled back. For example, one of the most important markets is the labor market. Without trade unions, workers are at a tremendous disadvantage vis a vis their large employers, and Reagan was determined to smash unions. Conditions for organizing have continued to deteriorate since then, the unionized labor force has greatly shrunken, and wages have been stagnant for more than four decades. At the same time, good jobs are increasingly exported abroad where wages are lower. We are seeing significant pushback now with teacher's strikes and moves to raise the minimum wage, which is precisely a significant regulation of the labor market just as is banning child labor.

In Western Europe, regulation has been much greater and unions are generally much stronger. So are social benefits such as universal health care, vacations and holidays, maternity and paternity leave, severance pay, and so on. There has been a strong push, which goes back at least to Margaret Thatcher in the UK, to crush unions, remove regulations, and lower living standards. Angry workers who can no longer find decent jobs are voting in ultra-rightists and fascists in the UK, France, Poland, Hungary, and even in Sweden. They are voting against parties which increased their misery, but such parties offer no viable solutions.

Now that we are in the grip of a cataclysmic climate catastrophe, we need even more government regulation of markets, but such regulation is being slashed left and right. It was the Neo-Liberal Democrats under Bill Clinton, for example, who repealed the Glass-Stegal separation of consumer banking from commercial banking. That led directly to the mortgage crisis of 2008. Neo-Conservatives, like Donald Trump, are accelerating deregulation.

There is also a political market in which wealthy donors buy the favors of elected officials. The Supreme Court removed key regulation of that market both by eliminating individual spending limits and by viewing such spending as free speech, even by corporations. The political market is the most unfair of all because those who manipulate it in turn use it to enact laws which tip the scales more in their favor in all the other markets.

For all these reasons, we should fight not for "free" markets but for fair markets in which all participants have the opportunity to gain. Fair markets can only be achieved through government regulation, which can only be achieved through massive and militant grassroots pressure. That is our job.

Without Stalin, There Might Be No Israel

I would guess that most people are unaware of the role that Stalin and the Soviet Union played in the creation of Israel. Stalin thought that Israel was going to be a socialist country, and so he supported the Zionists for a few years until he found out how wrong he was. The USA did not begin to give massive support to Israel until after the 1967 war. The 1947-48 war occurred in two distinct phases. The first stage largely ended in a stalemate, and a ceasefire was negotiated. The ceasefire specified that no weapons were to be imported to Palestine. But the Zionist army ignored that. Stalin sent them arms via then Czechoslavakia. Once the Zionists had overwhelming military superiority, they again violated the ceasefire and launched the second phase and expanded their territory from the 54 percent given them by the United Nations (at a time when Jews were only about one-third of the population and owned a much smaller percentage of the land) to the 78 percent they controlled when they declared the state of Israel in 1948. They used the arms not so much to fight the ill-equipped Arab armies as to drive about 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in what became Israel. They massacred entire villages. In others, they killed the men and raped the women. Without the weapons Stalin sent them, they probably could not have done all this. History is worth remembering.

Ukraine Fills the News Again

In 2014, as the Ukrainian people rose up and drove out their corrupt rulers, I posted a brief history of Ukraine in a blog here. Few Americans know much, if anything, about the history or contemporary affairs in Ukraine. I have studied that history and followed those affairs partly because one of my grandmothers was born in Ukraine and because her husband, my grandfather, was born in Odessa, which was then part of Russia but which was given to Ukraine in 1920 after the Bolshevik Revolution. I have also been to Ukraine, including a week's vacation in Crimea.

In 2019, Ukraine is back in the news as a major part of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Donald J. Trump. I doubt that mosts Americans have learned much about Ukraine since 2014. I doubt that they understand that the Ukrainian people have their own agenda which makes no concessions to the agendas of the USA or Russia. Thus, what happens in Ukraine cannot simply be understood as a product of great power rivalry. I doubt that they understand that Russia, the USA, and the UK guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity in a 1994 treaty in which Ukraine agreed to send all its nuclear weapons to Russia. Nobody seems to want to talk about that treaty. I doubt that most Americans understand how deep is the poverty and lack of opportunity for the vast majority of Ukrainians. I doubt that they appreciate how dysfunctional is the Ukrainian economy, which has not recovered from the division of production inherited from the Soviet Union and which, like Russia, is encumbered by the de facto theft of so many resources by the oligarchs who run that economy. I doubt that they understand how Putin looks with fear at the aspirations of the Ukrainian people which are remarkably similar to the aspirations of the Russian people.

I tell my Ukrainian friends that corruption goes much deeper in the USA even than in Ukraine because it goes to the heart of our political and economic systems. In Ukraine, bribing the police and stealing public money and property are typical forms of corruption, but those forms of corruption, though they cripple the hope of economic development, are petty compared to the kind of systemic corruption we live with in the USA.

Widespread American ignorance of Ukrainian reality fuels the ability of demagogues to spread lies and distortions about Ukraine. Those who discuss Ukraine owe it to themselves and the rest of us to educate themselves about this subject.

The Anti-Jewish State: Chapter 1: The Early Zionists

Chapter 1: The Early Zionists

The material which follows in this chapter was first published by me in five blogs in 2010 under the title “Political Zionism: The Ideology of Jewish Self-Hatred.”

It has always seemed ironic to me when Zionists refer to their Jewish opponents as "self-hating Jews" because Zionism is precisely an ideology founded on Jewish self hatred. I am going to begin by quoting some of the most prominent early political Zionists without comment. Then I will analyze them and explain their relevance to the contemporary Israeli state. At the end I will give some references. I urge you not to take my word for it but to read Zionist writers for yourself. Their ideas are much too bizarre for me to make them up, and I am only quoting highlights, or perhaps what should be called lowlights.

Leo Pinsker from Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882) in Arthur Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea (Atheneum 1972). Pinsker was an assimilated Russian Jew. I call this the vampire theory of anti-Semitism.

The eternal problem presented by the Jewish question stirs men today as it did ages ago. It remains unsolved, like the squaring of the circle, but unlike it, it is still a burning question. This is due to the fact that it is not merely a problem of theoretic interest, but one of practical interest, which renews its youth from day to day, as it were,  and presses more and more urgently for a solution.

The essence of the problem, as we see it, lies in the fact that, in the midst of the nations among whom the Jews reside, they form a distinctive element which cannot be assimilated, which cannot be readily digested by any nation. Hence the problem is to find means of so adjusting the relations of this exclusive element to the whole body of the nations that there shall never be any further basis for the Jewish question.

We cannot, of course, think of establishing perfect harmony. Such harmony has probably never existed, even among other nations. The millennium in which national differences will disappear, and the nations will merge into humanity, is still invisible in the distance. Until it is realized, the desires and ideals of the nations must be limited to establishing a tolerable modus vivendi.

....[The Jewish people] lacks most of those attributes which are the hallmark of a nation. It lacks that characteristic national life which is inconceivable without a common language, common customs, and a common land. The Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; it has no rallying point, no center of gravity, no government of its own, no accredited representatives. It is everywhere a guest, and nowhere at home.

The nations never have to deal with a Jewish nation but always mere Jews. The Jews are not a nation because they lack a certain distinctive national character, possessed by every other nation, a character which is determined by living  in one country, under one rule. ....

The strongest factor, however, operating to prevent the Jews from striving after an independent national existence is the fact that they do not feel the need for such an existence. Not only do they feel no need for it, but they go so far as to deny the reasonableness of such a need.

In a sick man, the absence of desire for food and drink is a very serious symptom.....

The Jews are in the unhappy condition of such a patient.... We must prove that the misfortunes of the Jews are due, above all, to their lack of desire for national independence; and that this desire must be aroused and maintained in them if they do not wish to exist forever in a disgraceful state--in a word, we must prove that they must become a nation.
This one apparently insignificant fact, that the Jews are not considered a separate nation by the other nations, is, to a great extent the hidden cause of their anomalous position and of their endless misery. The mere fact of belonging to this people is a mark of Cain on one's forehead, an indelible stigma which repels non-Jews and is painful to the Jews themselves....

Among the living nations of the earth the Jews occupy the position of a nation long since dead. With the loss of their fatherland, the Jews lost their independence and fell into a state of decay which is incompatible with the existence of a whole and vital organism. The state was crushed by the Roman conquerors and vanished from the world's view. But after the Jewish people had yielded up its existence as an actual state, as a political entity, it could nevertheless not submit to total destruction--it did not cease to exist as a spiritual nation. Thus, the world saw in this people the frightening form of one of the dead walking among the living. This ghostlike apparition of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bond of union, no longer alive, and yet moving among the living--this eerie form scarcely paralleled in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, could not fail to make a strange and peculiar impression upon the imagination of the nations. And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of humanity, is it any wonder that it asserted itself powerfully at the sight of this dead and yet living nation?

Fear of the Jewish ghost has been handed down and strengthened for generations and centuries. It led to a prejudice which, in its turn, in connection with other forces to be discussed later, paved the way for Judeophobia.

Along with a number of other subconscious and superstitious ideas, instincts, and idiosyncrasies, Judeophobia, too, has become rooted and naturalized among all the peoples of the earth with whom the Jews have had intercourse. Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy, with the distinction that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind, not merely to certain races, and that it is not disembodies, like other ghosts, but is a being of flesh and blood, and suffers the most excrutiating pain from the wounds inflicted upon it by the fearful mob who imagine it threatens them.

Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration, it is hereditary; as a disease transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable.

Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was also assimilated and a journalist. It was his coverage of the Dreyfus trial in France which sparked him to want to deal with the Jewish question. Dreyfus was a French officer falsely accused of espionage and convicted because he was Jewish. Herzl addressed his piece, "The Jewish State," to "my dear Lord Rothschild." In that sense, he was writing a funding proposal.

Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896) in Arthur Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea

The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is an ancient one: It is the restoration of the Jewish State.

The world resounds with clamor against the Jews, and this has revived the dormant idea.

....

The understand of economics among men actively engaged in business is often astonishingly slight. This seems to be the only explanation for the fact that even Jews faithfully parrot the catchword of the anti-Semites: "We live off 'Host-nations'; and if we had no 'Host-nation' to sustain us we should starve to death." This is one case in point of the undermining of our self-respect through unjust accusations....

The Jewish question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. It is a misplaced piece of medievalism which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will. They proved they had this high-minded desire when they emancipated us. The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilized countries--see, for instance, France--so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

Anti-Semitism is a highly complex movement, which I think I understand. I approach this movement as a Jew, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see in it the elements of cruel sport, of common commercial rivalry, of inherited prejudice, or religious intolerance--but also of a supposed need for self-defense. I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, and to solve it we must first of all establish it as an international political problem to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.

We are a people--one people.

We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country. The majority decide who the "alien" is; this, and all else in the relations between peoples, is a matter of power. I do not surrender any part of our prescriptive right when I make this statement merely in my own name,, as an individual. In the world as it now is and will probably remain, for an indefinite period, might takes precedence over right. It is without avail, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots, who were forced to emigrate. If we were left in peace . . .

But I think we shall not be left in peace.

Oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us. No nation on earth has endured such struggles and sufferings as we have. Jew-baiting has merely winnowed out our weakings; the strong among us defiantly return to their own whenever persecution breaks out. This was most clearly apparent in the period immediately following the emancipation of the Jews. Those Jews who rose highest intellectually and materially entirely lost the sense of unity with their people. Wherever we remain politically secure for any length of time, we assimilate. I think this is not praiseworthy. Hence, the statesman who would wish to see a Jewish strain added to his nation must see to it that we continue politically secure. But even a Bismarck could never achieve that.

....

 No one can deny the gravity of the Jewish situation. Wherever they live in appreciable number, Jews are persecuted in greater or lesser measure. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderate high offices in the army, or in any public or private institutions. And attempts are being made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!"

Attacks in parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journey--for example, their exclusion from certain hotels--even in places of recreation are increasing from day to day. The forms of persecution vary according to country and social circle. In Russia, special taxes are levied on Jewish villages; in Romania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, anti-Semites exercise their terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. The varieties of anti-Jewish expression are innumerable. But this is not the occasion to attempt the sorry catalogue of Jewish hardships. We shall not dwell on particular cases, however painful.

....

The common people have not, and indeed cannot have, any comprehension of history. They do not know that the sins of the Middle Ages are now being visited on the nations of Europe. We are what the ghetto made us. We have without a doubt attained pre-eminence in finance because medieval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated. We are again being forced into moneylending--now named stock exchange--by being kept out of other occupations. But once on the stock exchange, we are again objects of contempt. At the same time we continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellectuals who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer acutely in the struggle between the classes, because we stand in the most exposed position in both the capitalist and socialist camps.

....

Palestine or Argentina?

Is Palestine or Argentina preferable? The Society will take whatever it is given and whatever Jewish public opinion favors. The Society will determine both these points.

[paragraph on the advantages of Argentina] ....

Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland. The very name would be a marvelously effective rallying cry. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake the complete management of the finances of Turkey. We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism. We should as a neutral state remain in contactl with all of Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.

Ber Borochov would be only a footnote in history if his ideas had not inspired the founders of the Israeli Labour Party.

Our Platform (1906) in Hertzberg.

....

Since the Jewish nation has no peasantry, our analysis of its national problem deals with urban classes: the upper, middle, and petty bourgeoisie; the masses who are being proletarized; and the proletariat.

....

The Jewish problem migrates with the Jews. Thus a universal Jewish problem is created which involves not only Jewish philanthropists but also the political powers of the civilized nations . . .

....

Proletarian Zionism is possible only if its aims can be achieved through the class struggle; Zionism can be realized only if proletarian Zionism is realized.

. . . The Jewish proletariat is in need of revolution more than any other. ....

....

Political territorial autonomy in Palestine is the ultimate aim of Zionism. For proletarian Zionists, this is also a step toward socialism.

....

Vladimir Jabotinsky is the intellectual father of the Likud Party in Israel. He was based in Mussolini's Italy (they were ideologically close) until Hitler demand that he be expelled.


Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission (1937) in Hertzberg

Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists, among whom there were many great minds--I am not going to fatigue you by quoting them--three generations have given much thought to analyzing the Jewish position and have come to the conclusion that the cause of our suffering is the very fact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that we are everywhere a minority. It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer....

We are not free agents. We cannot "concede" anything. Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own Party, accused of asking for too much--Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes, we do want a State; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and the humblest who do not claim  merit, any role in humanity's development, they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same condition as the Albanians enjoy, to say nothing of the French and the English, then it is called too much. I should understand it if the answer were, "It is impossible," but when the answer is, "It is too much," I cannot understand it.....

I am going to make a "terrible" confession. Our demand for a Jewish majority is not our maximum--it is our minimum: it is just an inevitable stage if only we are allowed to go on salvaging our people....

There is only one way of compromise. Tell the Arabs the truth, and then you will see the Arab is reasonable, the Arab is clever, the Arab is just; the Arab can realize that since there are three or four or five wholly Arab states, then it is a thing of justice which Great Britain is doing if Palestine is transformed into a Jewish state. Then there will be a change of mind among the Arabs, then there will be room for compromise and there will be peace.

Chaim Weizmann led the establishment Zionist movement in the first half of the 20th century and was the first president of Israel.

Zionism Needs a Living Content (1914) in Hertzberg

In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country. The owners of the country must, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the people and for the country, but also for themselves. On this basis grew Zionism. First, we must sell many shekalim to show the Turks how strong we are, in the meantime, the leaders will discuss the question of the marriage....

It is the Zionists' good fortune that they are considered mad; if we were normal, we would not think of going to Palestine, but stay put, like all normal people. Who does not believe in taking a hard road and thinks that a dangerous road should not be taken had better stay at home. With fear and timidity the permanent home of the nation cannot be established. Never has a people freed itself by profitable investments, but by energy and sacrifice. And we Jews have not made many sacrifices yet, and that is why we own only 2 per cent of the Palestinian soil.

What value there is in real sacrifice, the example of a Jew from Kiev will show you; his name is Barski. One of his sons, a worker, was killed on Palestinian soil, at Degania; the bereaved father writes a letter of comfort to the workers in Palestine and send his second son into this most dangerous life to take the place of the fallen one. This is the continuation, writes the bereaved father. And it is this Jew who is the greatest political Zionist after Herzl.

Reminiscences in Hertzberg (1937)

We Jews got the Balfour Declaration quite unexpectedly, or in other words, we are the greatest war profiteers. We never dreamed of the Balfour Declaration; to be quite frank, it came to us overnight. But--"What you have inherited from your father you must earn it anew to really possess it!" (Goethe) The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air, and a foundation had to be laid for it through years of exacting work; every day and every hour of these last ten years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come? I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: "Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?" For these people think in terms different from ours. The Jews, they knew, were against us; we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.
David Ben-Gurion was a founder of the Histadrut and the first prime minister of Israel.

The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution (1944) in Hertzberg

.... The separatist tendency that has manifested itself in our land uses the empty phrase "of proletarian origin" as its slogan. This doctrine is totally foreign to the spirit and essence of the Jewish revolution. Not the origin but the mission, not "whence" but "whither," is what will decide the fate of our revolution. The Jewish people is not a proletarian people and there are no sons of the proletariat to assure the success of its revolution. The mission of the Jewish revolution is to transform the Jewish people into a laboring people....

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 do not 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 Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappé 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, I counsel 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. And consider the contemporary alliances—in the age of Trump—of Israel and some of its supporters with the extreme right, including white and Christian supremacists, and neo-Nazis.

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 inaccurate 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.

The Anti-Jewish State: Introduction

For some time, I have been working on a book with the working title, The Anti-Jewish State. I have decided to start posting here so that it is available even if I never finish it. This first post is the Introduction. Most of Chapter 1 is in another blog, but I'll repost it in the next post.


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The Anti-Jewish State

By Steve Goldfield

Introduction

From the title, you might think I am writing about Saudi Arabia or ISIS, but this is a book about the anti-Jewish nature of the state of Israel. My ideas have developed on this topic over the more than 40 years I have studied, written, and acted on the conflict between Palestinians and the Jewish settlers who conquered their homeland. One of my early influences was Abram Leon, a Polish Jew who died in Auschwitz after writing a book called The Jewish Question. Leon introduced the material basis for European anti-Semitism, the specific role that Jewish moneylenders and peddlers (not all Jews were peddlers and moneylenders, but Christians were not allowed to lend money) played under feudalism. European nobles would organize pogroms to drive out moneylenders so that they would not have to repay loans. It was in the anti-Semitic environment of 19^th century Europe that political Zionism started and grew. I read Arthur Hertzberg's collection of early Zionist writings and saw that many of these Zionist writers internalized the anti-Semitism of their environment. I have to thank Stephen Pinker for bringing me this realization. I read Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, in the hope that I would learn something about how the human brain works. There's a bit of that at the beginning, but then Pinker uses his scientific notions to promote ridiculous, mostly conservative, ideas which do not at all follow from his discussion of the brain. One of those concerned the Zionist “pioneers” who came to Palestine. I Emailed Pinker to challenge what he said. He replied, and I commented on his reply that these pioneers had developed their ideas in the hotbed of anti-Semitic Europe and that their ideas were totally imbued with that racism.

The early Zionists agreed with anti-Semites who said that Jews did not belong in Europe. When some Zionists called me a self-hating Jew, they started me thinking about who really embodies self-hatred. An early book which revealed what nonsense that was was The New Anti-Semitism in America by Ruth and Nathan Perlmutter. They argued that to oppose US policy in Central America was anti-Semitic because it hurt Israel. They also said that they preferred to ally themselves with the religious right because the right to choose is less important than is Israel. Nathan Perlmutter had been a high official in the Anti-Defamation Committee of B'nai B'rith. You can see this position promoted strongly by Israel and its supporters who are passing laws to define criticism and boycott of Israel as anti-Semitic.

The fundamental evidence of racism in Zionism, however, is its central premise. What does it mean to tell a Jew that he or she does not belong in the country of their birth, that to fulfill themselves as a human being they have to go to another country. That is a very pure form of racism, and it is precisely analogous to what many Israelis openly say to Palestinians, especially in recent years.

I read and met (and sometimes interviewed) earlier anti-Zionist Jews such as Rabbi Elmer Berger and Alfred Lilienthal (who described himself as a Wilkie Republican), and they inspired me, too. I also met many anti-Zionist Israelis, but it was the many Palestinians I met and worked with who inspired me even more to get to the bottom of the issue. I read books by Palestinians, Israelis, and many others. I published a book entitled Garrison State: Israel's Role in US Foreign Policy at a time when Israel was very active in Central and South America, in Africa, and in Asia. I also published a paper on Israel's close ties with apartheid South Africa in a scholarly journal. It was to be the first chapter of a book I planned to write, but I was never able to complete that.

I began this journey in about 1970 when I began working against apartheid in South Africa. I had just joined a small organization with the name Liberation Support Movement. As a chemistry graduate student at UC Berkeley, I was invited to a meeting of the Organization of Arab Students, at which the members debated whether to be politically active or just be a social organization. The friend who invited me had met me at the antiapartheid committee at Cal. The OAS voted 2 to 1 for activism. Not long after that, when I was working in an anti-imperialist coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had a meeting with one of their Palestinian leaders, who told me that they had decided to work with Americans. They asked us to make one small change in our unity statement, which we did, and they joined our coalition. Ironically, in the late 1970s, local Palestinians had decided to focus on their own community, but in 1981, they said they were ready to work with Americans again. That led to the November 29^th Committee which morphed into the Palestine Solidarity Committee. That start in 1970 began decades of political work on my part. At first, I worked on Iran and the revolution in Oman, and I had to educate myself about those countries and eventually the entire Arabian peninsula and the region. The same was true of Southern Africa and Guiné Bissau and later East Timor. I remember writing, with an Iranian friend, an article in late 1978 which predicted that the days of the Shah were numbered. In fact, we were very surprised to be proven right so soon.

In 1978, I spent 3 months in southern Africa in Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique. It was in Mozambique that I first met Johnny Makatini, head of international affairs for the ANC. I interviewed him in Geneva in 1983 at the UN International Conference on the Question of Palestine. I did many other interviews, including one with Edward Said. I remember pointing out to Johnny that speaking out against Israel would cost some support in the United States. He was offended. He said that Palestine was a matter of principle for South Africans since Israel and South Africa shared apartheid systems as well as being very close allies. Another South African who influenced me a lot was Fred Dube, also an ANC member, and a professor of psychology. He lost his teaching position in New York because he devoted half of one lecture in a class on racism with 20 lectures to a discussion of Zionism. Fred clarified for me how arbitrary race definitions are. They can be total nonsense—as they were in South Africa—but they can still be enforced and shape a society. That made clear how Israel could be a classic racist state. Meanwhile, under very heavy US pressure, the United Nations General Assembly repealed its resolution that Zionism was a form of racism. I have always considered that one of the great intellectual crimes of the 20^th century.

Much of this was published in a newspaper that I coedited with the Palestine Solidary Committee, Palestine Focus. Three of the interviews that I did in Geneva, including the one with Johnny Makatini of the ANC, were also printed at the end of my book, Garrison State.

So, I have these influences and experiences and I am an incurable intellectual, which just means that I am always thinking about things. This led me to reconsider the nature of Zionism and Israel. I wrote a blog about Zionism, in which I concluded that it is profoundly anti-Jewish. Since Israel is founded on and imbued with political Zionism, that means that Israel is very anti-Jewish, too. That is how I got to the point where I decided to write this book.