Mondoweiss
Zionism's troubled relationship with anti-Semitism
Joel Reinstein on July 31, 2018
Head of Christians United for Israel John Hagee speaks at a rally at the
Jerusalem convention center, April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
On May 14, 2018 while Israeli forces were massacring Palestinian protesters
in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, the controversial new U.S. Embassy to
Israel opened in Jerusalem. Among the speakers at the ceremony were American
evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress. Both have a history of
making anti-Semitic comments: Jeffress has said that Jews are going to hell,
and Hagee has described the Holocaust as part of God's plan to return the
Jews to Israel. Their presence didn't seem to bother Israel, however, where
U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital was met with jubilation.
Indeed, the New York Times remarked that the pastors' attendance signaled
"the most public recognition yet of the growing importance the Netanyahu
government now assigns to its conservative Christian allies, even if some
have been accused of making anti-Semitic statements."
The embassy ceremony is only the latest example of Israel's apparent
willingness to align with right-wingers who are not only Islamophobic,
anti-immigrant and authoritarian, but anti-Semitic. From U.S. President
Donald Trump to Hungary's blatantly anti-semitic Viktor Orban, Israel's
growing relationship with the right internationally has presented a serious
challenge for its claim to represent Jewish self-determination, even as it
slanders the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as
anti-Semitic.
Why is "the Jewish state" supporting anti-Semites? Answers are suggested by
the history of anti-semitism as well as the origins of Zionism as a colonial
movement, which point to a contradictory relationship between the two. This
history can help us challenge Zionism today, blunting its attacks against
Palestine activists as well as its dangerous enabling of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism and the origins of the Zionist movement
Anti-Semitism should first be recognized as modern racism more than
religious persecution. Its basis is not in religious dogma, but in the
racist pseudoscience that developed in 19th century Europe, dividing
humanity into inherently different nations and races. It's of a kind with
justifications for European colonialism, which imagined the existence of a
superior white race tasked with the burden of bringing civilization to the
"lesser races" of the world.
Anti-Semitism was fueled by the ruling classes of European countries, who
used it for their own interests. The Russian Tsars, under whose rule most of
Europe's Jews lived in the 19th century, scapegoated Jews to deflect and
confuse popular anger. Anti-Semitism offered "Jewish financiers" or
"communist Jews" as alternative targets for the ire of poor gentiles. It
portrayed Jews as greedy and conniving, engaged in elaborate conspiracies
for global domination. The most infamous example is the forged "Protocols of
the Elders of Zion," fabricated by Russian ultra-nationalists to appear as
if it was a secret Jewish plan for world conquest.
Facing poverty, unemployment, a denial of political rights and anti-Semitic
pogroms, Jews in the Russian Empire began to emigrate en masse in the late
19th century. Many fled to western Europe, where small Jewish populations
enjoyed political rights and were largely integrated into wider society.
Their arrival was followed by a rise in anti-Semitism in western Europe,
much like the anti-immigrant racism of Europe today, regarding Jewish
immigrants as a subversive fifth column who didn't share the values and
customs of the nation.
In 1905, British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour presided over passage of the
Aliens Act, largely aimed at restricting Jewish immigration. Balfour, who
believed in the supremacy of the "white race," gave speeches supporting the
act about the supposed dangers presented by Jewish immigrants.
Rising anti-Semitism in France contributed to the false conviction of Jewish
army officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason in 1894. The "Dreyfus
Affair" was a major subject of public debate, and a shocking development in
the first country that had granted political rights to Jews. It was a blow
to the idea, popular among many Jews, that the answer to anti-Semitism was
Jewish integration into wider society (commonly referred to as
"assimilation," a term that didn't carry the negative connotations it does
today). Covering the story as a journalist, Austrian Jewish intellectual
Theodor Herzl became convinced that Jews could never be safe as a minority.
In 1896 he wrote "The Jewish State," a book that became the basis for the
Zionist movement, and a year later he convened the first Zionist Congress in
Switzerland.
For Herzl and the Zionists, persecution of Jews was essentially a permanent
feature of gentile society. They held that Jews constituted a separate
nation, and following nationalist ideas of the day, the Jewish nation needed
its own "soil," its own country and national state. Creating such a state
would finally resolve "the Jewish question," with Jews finally taking their
place among the world's nations.
Zionism's colonialism
While this history is uncontroversial, the colonial nature of Zionism, both
in practice and ideologically, is left out of most accounts. Zionism
accepted racist, colonialist ideas, and its project required the support of
a colonial power to succeed. The Zionist slogan describing Palestine as "a
land without a people for a people without a land" obviously ignored the
existence of the Palestinians who already lived there. Zionists conceived of
their project as spreading civilization, "redeeming" and "restoring" the
land by cultivating it and making it more productive. An ugly passage in
Herzl's "The Jewish State" exemplifies his colonialism, conceiving of a
Jewish state in Palestine as "a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,
an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism."
Practically, the Zionist movement recognized that creating a Jewish state in
Palestine would require the support of a colonial power to deal with the
indigenous Palestinians. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing
Revisionist Zionism, summarized this in his 1923 essay "The Iron Wall:"
"Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the
native population [emphasis his]. Which means that it can proceed and
develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the
native population - behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot
breach.
That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is,
whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour
Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that an outside Power
has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration
and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work,
they will find it impossible."
Herzl himself appealed to a number of colonial powers for support (often
unsuccessfully). His diaries offer one example, a 1902 letter intended for
the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company had
founded the settler colony of Rhodesia:
"You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you, nor
will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn't involve
Africa, but a piece of Asia minor, not Englishmen but Jews.
But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now.
How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way
matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial, and because it
presupposes understanding of a development which will take twenty or thirty
years."
With the first waves of Zionist settlement in Palestine, its colonialism
would be proven in cruel practice well before the 1948 creation of Israel.
Zionist settlers began the process of expelling Palestinians from their
land, buying land from wealthy Palestinian landlords and expelling
Palestinian peasants from it. A wide range of other racist practices would
later be described by the Israeli Labor Party leader David HaCohen, a
so-called "socialist Zionist," in a 1969 speech:
"I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the
fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to
defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend
the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from
getting jobs there. . To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish
housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought. to buy
dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one
Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild, the incarnation
of capitalism as a socialist and to name him 'benefactor' - to do all that
was not easy. And despite the fact that we did it - maybe we had no choice -
I wasn't happy about it."
It's important to note that Zionism was initially a minority position among
Europe's Jews. Whereas today Zionists equate their ideology with Judaism,
"the politics of Jewish self-determination," the movement was opposed by
many Jews for numerous reasons. Many favored assimilation into larger
society. But there was another politics of Jewish self-determination that
rejected both assimilation and Zionism, calling for socialism and Jewish
autonomy in Europe. Its eventual defeat, and Zionism's triumph, would be
brutally effected by powers outside of Jewish politics.
The Jewish Bund
Formed in 1897, the same year as the founding of the World Zionist
Organization, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia
was a Jewish socialist party and communal organization. It was rooted in the
Jewish working class in the Russian Empire, and fought for a socialist
society as well as Jewish national autonomy within that society. At its
height, it boasted over 30,000 members and even more supporters.
The Bund organized agitational reading groups for Jewish workers in their
own language, Yiddish, rather than in Russian. It organized strikes as well
as self-defense militias, sometimes successfully beating back pogroms. It
also ran Yiddish schools and cultural programs, as well as publishing
newspapers and journals in Yiddish. Like other socialist organizations in
Russia, it had to operate as an illegal or semi-legal organization, and at
one point, some 4,500 members of the Bund were held in the Tsar's prisons.
As socialists, the Bundists stood for working class internationalism, but
unlike the rest of the socialist movement (which also included many Jews),
the Bund opposed Jewish assimilation. Instead, Bundists tried to combine
working class internationalism with Jewish nationalism. They rejected
Zionism as a colonial movement, countering with the principle of doikayt,
roughly "here-ness" in Yiddish. Doikayt celebrated diaspora Jewish culture
and held that Jews belong wherever they live: instead of going over "there"
and colonizing Palestine, Jews should fight anti-Semitism "here" at home,
together alongside non-Jewish workers as part of the struggle for socialism.
When Palestinians rioted against Zionist settlement in 1929, the Zionist
movement decried the riots as anti-Semitic, but the Bundist newspapers
replied that in fact the riots were anti-colonialist.
The Russian Revolution and Civil War would see the Bund dissolve itself into
the Russian Communist Party, but the organization persisted in
newly-independent Poland, where the Bund continued to be active throughout
the interwar period. It would ultimately be destroyed in the Nazi holocaust.
More than merely being defeated and dissolved, the Bund was wiped out, with
even the memory of it buried along with the people and communities who
composed it.
Zionism's triumph in Jewish politics
While the Holocaust's victims obviously included Zionists and Jews of all
political affiliations, the Zionist movement as a whole would fare much
better than the Bund. Unlike the Bund, Zionism's base of support was not
limited to eastern Europe. Crucially, the Zionist movement would benefit
from the support of Great Britain. Zionism could not have colonized
Palestine without British support - and many of its strongest supporters in
the British government were themselves virulently anti-Semitic.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, for example, famously declared British support
for the creation of a "national home for the Jews" in Palestine. The
declaration is named for Britain's foreign minister Arthur Balfour, the same
Arthur Balfour who as prime minister had railed against the dangers of
Jewish immigration and overseen passage of legislation targeting Jewish
immigrants.
Another British statesman expressed support for Zionism in an essay rife
with anti-Semitic bigotry and conspiracy theory. In his 1920 essay "Zionism
versus Bolshevism," Winston Churchill contrasted "good Jews" with "bad
Jews," decrying the "schemes of the international Jews" in pursuing a
"world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination." Churchill called on
Jews in every country to prove their loyalty by "combating the Bolshevik
conspiracy." By contrast, he praised the Zionist movement, and wrote that
Great Britain had "the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for
the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life." He
described Zionism as the alternative to communism in the "struggle for the
soul of the Jewish people." (Churchill's essay is popular today with
right-wing anti-Semites, finding an expression of their own views from a
highly respected historical figure.)
Britain would provide privileged treatment to Zionist settlers in Palestine
against the indigenous population. Settlers were granted economic
concessions by the British colonial government of Palestine that were denied
to Palestinians, and the settlers were afforded the freedom to develop their
settlements independent of British rule, in contrast to direct British
control over Palestinian life.
When Palestinians revolted in 1936 against both British rule and Zionist
colonization, Britain turned to Zionist settler militias for military
support in crushing the rebellion, offering arms and training and
incorporating thousands of settlers into a colonial military force. The
arming and training of Zionists as well as the defeat of the Palestinian
revolt would set the stage for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the
creation of Israel in 1948. And while Britain was making possible the
creation of a Zionist state, it along with the rest of the world would turn
its back on Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, with strict quotas for Jewish
immigration.
Jewish self-determination?
This history shows how the debate between Zionism and other Jewish politics
did not take place on a level playing field. Zionism didn't come to dominate
Jewish politics through rational debate or an equal exchange of ideas.
Colonialism and genocide from outside Jewish communities would intervene
overwhelmingly, practically selecting Zionism to thrive while alternatives
were destroyed. Is that self-determination?
The creation of Israel and Zionism's dominance of Jewish politics today
would have been impossible without outside intervention, including support
from powerful anti-Semites. This contradiction carries through to today's
alliance between Israel, now more clearly than ever a racist settler
colonial regime, and the global far right that shares its values.
That alliance has real consequences. As long as it's widely recognized as
"the Jewish state" and the ultimate authority on all matters Jewish, Israel
can powerfully shield anti-Semitic governments from criticism. Hungary's
Orban, who infamously praised a Hungarian nazi and has launched a virulently
anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, was
recently praised by Netanyahu for his supposed efforts against
anti-Semitism. Netanyahu also interjected to defend Trump from accusations
of anti-Semitism, saying there's "no greater supporter of the Jewish people"
than Trump and that we "should put that to rest." If the leader of "the
Jewish state" says so, who can say he's wrong?
Standing with Palestinians
The Palestine solidarity movement, particularly in the United States,
recognizes that focusing on Jews to the exclusion of Palestinians is itself
a concession to Zionism. Recognition of Palestinian humanity should be
reason enough to oppose Zionism, and it's Palestinians who face expulsion,
torture, theft and murder under Israel's apartheid regime. As Israel has
openly embraced the global right, its ethnic cleansing of Palestine has
accelerated, with the rate of settlement expansion effectively tripling
since Donald Trump's election, and apparent preparations to annex the
occupied territories.
The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for freedom and
equality has never been more urgent. But there are still many liberals,
Jewish and gentile, who feel conflicted between Palestinian rights and "the
Jewish state." Without necessarily accepting the slander and repression
against BDS, they hesitate to support it. They should consider Zionism's
relationship with anti-Semitism, and recognize that it's not a zero-sum game
between Palestinians and Jews. Indeed, exactly the opposite is true.
Standing behind the demands of Palestinian self-determination is critical
for resisting the rise of the far right, including a resurgence of real
anti-Semitism that is just beginning.
