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.