The Anti-Empire Project

[A note before we begin here: since the last entry in this series a reader made me aware of a pamphlet by the UK Communist Party’s Harpal Brar, on the same subject matter as Part 5 of this series. People are apparently being arrested for distributing it, but it’s in the UK so no surprise there. Reading the pamphlet made me aware of Lenni Brenner’s work on the topic, the 1983 book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, and the follow up 51 Documents. Both works are well documented and cover similar ground in case you want to continue studying this topic. OK, on we go.]

In Part 5 of this series I mentioned that the goal of the WW2-era Zionists was to get “human material” for their colony – the material being Jewish people. The acquisition of this “good human material” involved cruel measures by the early Zionists at several key moments in Jewish history, as the book by Yosef Grodzinsky of that title (renamed in the English version to In the Shadow of the Holocaust). One review of Grodzinsky’s work can be found here. 

Grodzinsky describes a moment when Zionists resorted to cruel measures against Jews in order to acquire this “human material”.

It was the immediate aftermath of WW2, when the Nazi displaced persons (DP) camps were taken over by the Allies. Grodzinsky writes: “thousands of children were lingering in the DP camps, their suffering generating empathy and a desire to help. Perched on bunks amidst the filth like all survivors, their weak bodies were, more than the rest, suffering from malnutrition and disease.”

Organizations from the Allied countries made plans for the expedited rescue of orphans to France, England, and elsewhere. But Zionist leaders objected:

‘“The specter of Jewish children going to European countries seemed threatening to them, as it ran counter to their project—to bring all surviving children to Palestine, as part of Ben-Gurion’s vision “to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews.”’

The British Jewish envoy, Shalom Adler-Rudel was sent to negotiate with the Zionist leadership – to try to get them to agree to let the children leave to Europe. The Zionists refused to let the children leave the camps until their transfer to Palestine was arranged: “I am a good Zionist,” he told them. But “your decision is not right.”

Another postwar moment Grodzinsky describes is when Zionists attempted to recruit Jewish survivors from the camps into the military to fight the Palestinians. One reporter from the camps, Moshe Ajzenbud, described the mood in a New York socialist magazine:

“Most Jewish refugees who had been through the hell of the ghetto, slavery and death camps under the Nazis, Soviet forced-labor camps, and other disasters, yearn for some quiet place. Regardless of their views on current events in Palestine, they feel physically drained, and have no desire to go into the fire again. They rightfully ask—even the Zionists among them—why do we, having been so pained and tortured, need to go back into the fire?”

When only 700 signed up, the Zionists imposed conscription. “Employees were fired, residents were evicted from their apartments, others were fined, or denied the supplementary food rations that the JDC was distributing to all camp Jews; others were simply beaten up.” Grodzinsky adds these recruitment methods were not anomalous, but systemic: 

“Violent incidents were numerous: The archives are replete with hundreds of official documents describing brutal methods and actions carried out in an identical manner in a large number of camps in Germany and Austria, taking place mostly between March and August 1948. The archives also contain testimony and affidavits about “waves of Zionist harassment” in the camps,as well as vile descriptions, coming from various camps, of forced removal of Jews objecting to the draft from Camp Committees, arrests, and beatings. In a camp near Ulm, for example, “a father of Giyus evader Wecker was beaten up, as was the father of one who did not register; in another case an old father—Richter Aizik, was beaten because his son Moshe Richter did not register…”

The Zionists were more than willing to resort to violence against Jews to make sure the latter were available as “human material” for their colony. 

Zionists suppressed diverse Jewish cultures inside Israel

Once they ended up in Israel, the culture Jews brought with them was negated and erased by the Zionists who had already settled there (referred to as Sabras in the quote that follows). American-Israeli blogger Matt Adler wrote in 2018 that “many Jews arrived (and indeed, arrive) to Israel, Sabras greeted them with hatred.  Iraqi Jews were shamed for speaking Judeo-Arabic.  Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors were not only attacked for speaking Yiddish, they were also called “sabonim” or “soap”…because of the rumor that Hitler made soap out of their families’ bodies.” 

In The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Israeli historian Tom Segev described the Zionist campaign of assimilation of the German Jews who went to Israel as refugees from Hitler (called yekkes). When German newspapers sprang up, Zionist activists suppressed them.

“The aim was “to get the German newspapers out of our lives.” Some of the participants said it meant war. One of them proposed demanding of advertisers that they refrain from buying space in the foreign-language press—and demanding of Hebrew newspapers that they not accept ads from those who advertised there. Coffeehouses, barbershops, and hotels should also be told not to offer foreign-language newspapers to their customers.’”

The campaign was ultimately successful, but not before some dramatic moments:

“The intolerance and fanaticism that characterized the campaign to promote Hebrew offended many, the German Immigrants’ Association warned in its newsletter, adopting a heroine for itself: a fourteen-year-old girl, a pupil at a Jerusalem school, to whom a classmate had said, “Go back to Hitler.” The brave and proud girl slapped her classmate on the cheek.”

Yemeni Jews got it even worse. Yakov Rabkin (A Threat From Within, pg. 43) describes their situation: 

“The Yemeni Jews, well known for their devotion to the Torah and for their Judaic erudition, were subjected upon their arrival in Israel in the late 1940s to secular re-education campaigns, often in isolated camps. This measure was aimed primarily at the young, who, while not actually kidnapped, were nonetheless forced to endure ideological pressures designed to estrange them from tradition. Many sources concur: physical violence was employed, particularly when the young secular camp commanders forbade access to young religious Jews who wished to assist the internees… Their Zionist educators apparently forced the young Yemeni Jews to harvest oranges on the Sabbath, to walk about bareheaded and to cut off the side-curls the Yemeni Jews had worn for centuries.”

Zionists wanted to craft the “human material” of Jews into a specific type of colonist. The cultural diversity of Jewish life in the diaspora was disdained. 

Zionists set out to destroy Jewish diaspora life in Iraq and Egypt

Zeev Sternhell in the 1998 book, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, discusses Zionism’s negation of the diaspora:

“a hatred of the diaspora and a rejection of Jewish life were a kind of methodological necessity for Zionism… not only was Jewish history in exile deemed to be unimportant, but the value of living Jews, Jews of flesh and blood, depended entirely on their use as raw material for natural revival.” 

The project of colonizing Palestine has required Zionists to destroy diasporic Jewish life. Zionists used terrorism to destroy the relationships between Jewish communities and the countries in which they lived. 

Iraq terrorist bombings 1949-1952: John Cooley, in the 2005 book Alliance Against Babylon: the US, Israel, and Iraq, cited Naim Giladi, Rabbi Elmer Berger, and Mordecai Ben-Porat about a series of five terrorist bombings against the Jewish community in Baghdad between 1949-52 that helped spark the exodus of Iraq’s Jewish community to Israel. 

1. One bomb on March 19, 1950, at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad;

2. The next April 8, 1950, a grenade attack at the Dar-el-Beida cafe. “That night and the next day, leaflets scattered in Jewish neighbourhoods called on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.”

3. Another grenade attack followed on May 10, this time against a Jewish owned car dealership; another on June 3, 1950 in the wealthy Jewish neighbourhood of El-Batawin. “The Zionist emigration activists asked Tel Aviv to raise the quota for immigration from Iraq.”

4. Another bomb next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shasghura building on June 5. “Most members of the Baghdad Jewish community believed that extremist Iraqis, probably all Muslims, wanted to kill them or drive them out, so as to seize their property and money.”

5. On January 14, 1951, a major grenade attack hit a synagogue full of Kurdish Jews, killing two children and one adult and injuring dozens. By March, “the tempo of flights increased to three or four a day.” 

By the end of the exodus, just 5,000 Iraqi Jews remained of a community that had numbered 130,000. Once the damage was done, the Iraqi authorities caught a man named Yehudah Tajjar, who gave them the names of 15 conspirators. Israel’s emissary, Mordecai Ben-Porat, wrote a book, To Baghdad and Back, (cited by Cooley) that argued that Israel was innocent of wrongdoing. “A series of letters and affidavits, attached to the official Israeli findings, seem to show that the three Jews executed were innocent and framed, and that the attacks were the work of Iraqi officialdom.” 

One of the Iraqi Jews who was part of the exodus to Israel after these bombings was Avi Shlaim, who would become one of the so-called Israeli ‘New Historians’. In his book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew, he concludes that the Zionist underground was responsible for three of these bombings, but that two others were the work of other Iraqi factions. His evidence includes the initial Baghdad police report, which Shlaim believes “constitutes undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that helped to terminate two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.”

The Lavone Affair / Operation Susannah, Egypt 1954: The Iraq bombings were repeated in Egypt with a series of bombs in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954. In Shlaim’s description: 

“A number of Egyptian Jews were arrested for planting bombs in public places and in the US Information Service offices in Cairo and Alexandria. This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition.”

See also Shlaim’s fellow “New Historian” Joel Beinin’s 1998 book, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of Modern Diaspora, Chapter 4.

Shlaim calls these operations “Cruel Zionism” and argues in his book that while the Palestinians were the “main victims of the Zionist project”, the “Jews of the Arab lands” were a “second category of the victims of the Zionist movement”. The conspiracy and terrorism against Jewish people in Iraq and Egypt is another example of the anti-Jewish nature of Zionism. 

In their acquisition and shaping of “human material” for their colony, Zionists have shown no compunction about the ruthless destruction of Jewish lives, cultures, and traditions.

Zionism includes the belief that everyone in the world simply hates Jews

Anti-Zionist Jewish writer Moshe Menuhin, in his 1969 book Not by Might, nor by Power: The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism, quoted historian Arnold Toynbee who wrote in the NYT in 1961 about the common ground between Nazis and Zionists: 

“Zionism and anti-Semitism are expressions of an identical point of view. The assumption underlying both ideologies is that it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to grow together into a single community and that therefore a physical separation is the only practical way out. The watchword of anti-Semitism is “Back to medieval apartheid”; the watchword of Zionism is “Back to the medieval ghetto.” All the far-flung ghettos in the world are to be gathered into one patch of soil in Palestine to create a single consolidated ghetto there.”

Faris Yahya, in his 1978 book Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (reviewed over at Liberated Texts) quotes a pamphlet from the socialist organization Matzpen arguing along similar lines: 

“Zionism accepts anti-Semitism as the natural, normal attitude of the non-Jewish world towards the Jew. It does not consider it a distorted, perverted phenomenon, it is a response to anti-Semitism but not a confrontation, denunciation or fight against it. Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of the anti-Semites.” 

These quotes diagnose the common ground between Zionist ideology and the most anti-Jewish ideology ever invented: Nazism. 

Race Science and Zionism

Nazism is basically an extreme combination of two Western inventions: scientific racism and anti-communism. Zionism makes use of both. 

As a European ideology of race hierarchy, violence, and anti-communism, some form of Nazism is found in all European countries. Nazis seek a Europe cleansed both of inferior races and socialist influences. 

Nazis associate Jews with both racial inferiority and with socialism (see, e.g., Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism or Joe Emersberger’s review of Mein Kampf, which he calls “Hitler’s Love Letter to Western Imperialism”). As you will see below, Zionists also associate Jews with racial inferiority and with socialism.

Zionists and Nazis also share a common interest: Nazis want Jews out of Europe; Zionists want Jews in Palestine. 

Zionism and Nazism embraced scientific racism, eugenics, and the discredited idea that humanity could be subdivided into a hierarchy of races. The Nazi use of race science is well known. Perhaps less so the Zionist use of the same. But the Zionist embrace of eugenics and race science is reviewed in Tony Greenstein’s book Zionism During the Holocaust.

Greenstein reviews the early figures of what he calls “Racial Zionism”, including Moses Hess, who argued that ‘Race struggle is primary; class struggle is secondary’; Max Nordau, who called Jews ‘a race of accursed beggars’ in an address to the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and who told a French newspaper in 1903 that Zionism was ‘not a question of religion but exclusively of race’; and Jacob Klatzkin who argued that ‘we ought to be thankful to our oppressors that they closed the gates of assimilation to us and took care that our people were concentrated and not dispersed.’ 

But the great sage of racial Zionism was Arthur Ruppin, who Greenstein calls the “single most important figure in Palestinian Zionism in the first four decades of the 20th century.” Director of the Palestine Office from 1908, Hebrew University faculty from 1926, member of the Zionist Executive, founder of the kibbutz, known as the Father of Land Settlement. Ruppin was originally a German nationalist, but adopted Zionism after being rejected by that movement. In Ruppin’s view, East European (Ashkenazi) Jews were descended from Indo-Germanic races and were racially superior to Sephardic (from Spain/Portugal) and Oriental (from Asia) Jews. Sephardic and Oriental Jews shouldn’t be brought to Palestine at all, Ruppin believed, “since they carried Semitic dysgenic elements”. The Zionists nevertheless oversaw the importation of Yemeni Jews as “cheap labour for the Zionist project”, who suffered a 50% death rate between 1912-1918. 

Ruppin had won second place in an 1899 competition for the Krupp Prize for applying Social Darwinism to the organization of society. When a friend called him an anti-Semite, he wrote in his diary that “I have already established here that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.” In 1933, he had a friendly conversation with Hans Gunther, writing in his diary about the meeting with “Prof. Hans F.K. Gunther, the founder of National-Socialist race theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Gunther was most congenial and agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior but different, and that the Jewish question has to be solved justly.” Gunther, for his part, praised Zionism for “recognizing the genuine racial consciousness of the Jews.” 

Zionist doctors adopted eugenics: From The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics: “The educator Israel Rubin published a letter to physicians and educators in 1934, in the periodical of the Hebrew Authors’ Association in Palestine, entitled “The ingathering of the exiles from a eugenic perspective.” Rubin viewed “our life in the homeland, in its very essence” to be “a great and courageous national effort in the eugenic sense.”

“Anyone, who does not recognize the return of the sons to the land of their forefathers as a great eugenic revolution in the life of the nation, does not discern the ‘forest’ from the individual trees… The essence is the sum total: The production of a New Hebrew type restored and improved. Thus, a psychobiological approach to the problem of the settlement of Land of Israel is a duty to us all!”

Physician Joseph Mayer, chief executive of the health insurance fund for Jews in Palestine, wrote: “Who has the right to give birth to children? Eugenics, the science for the improvement of the race and keeping it from degeneration, is concerned with searching for proper answers to this question…” 

The Zionist leadership wanted to save the selected, not the mass. In the words of the United Jewish Appeal’s Henry Montor:

“Selectivity is an inescapable factor in dealing with the problem of immigration to Palestine. By ‘selectivity’ is meant the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes… there could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism… if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would ensure a continuity of immigration.” 

Genetic testing for eugenic reasons continues to be popular in Israel, as Meira Weiss writes in the 2002 book The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society. She notes that:

“Israeli geneticists have attitudes towards abortion [that] are, “on average, more positive and accepting than those of their international colleagues. For example, fully 68 percent of them agree that giving birth to a child with a serious impairment is socially wrong. In contrast, geneticists around the world usually regard the decision to abort a deformed fetus as primarily personal. An astounding 14 percent of the Israeli geneticists agree that “the role of genetics is to purify the human genetic pool,” a view that “flouts the international code of ethics of genetic counseling, which stresses non-directiveness.”

The foreign relations of the Zionist organizations and the Nazis

In Eastern Europe where most of the world’s Jews lived before World War 2, people living in Jewish communities held diverse identifications. Some were socialists, others religious Jews, others nationalists of the countries where they lived, others identified strongly with the Yiddish language, others with the Hebrew revival, and finally there were Zionists. Until the rise of Hitler, the Zionist view was not the majority or even the plurality among the world’s Jews. But by the time the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Zionists had claimed the right to speak for all Jews. How did this happen? 

The story of how it happened in Germany is recounted in Faris Yahya’s book. Most German Jews – 95% of those in an organization- belonged to the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, which had in its bylaws that its chief task was to fight anti-Semitism. Upon the arrival of the Nazis to power and the declaration of official anti-Semitism, this main organization of German Jews was declared “hostile to the State”. Yahya quotes Hannah Arendt on the consequences: “the Zionists could, for a time at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal co-operation with Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that ‘dissimilation’ combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a ‘mutually fair solution.’ At the time, many German officials held this opinion.” Yahya also mentions a Nazi march in June 1932, when “three hundred Nazis marched through the streets of Breslau and terrorised Jewish passersby, shouting ‘Let the Jews go to Palestine’.” 

Isaac Deutscher, Polish-Jewish socialist historian and author of the best-known biography of Trotsky, noted (quoted in Yahya) that “the great majority of Eastern European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, opposed to Zionism… they were a significant minority but they never succeeded in attracting a majority of their co-religionists. The most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish, those who considered themselves Jews; they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine.” These masses of enemies of Zionism were exterminated by the Nazis. 

The Jewish Agency for Palestine concluded a series of agreements with the German Reich, called the Ha’avara clearing agreements. A Jewish capitalist who wanted to emigrate to Palestine could make a deal with a German exporter, who would transfer goods to Palestine and be paid with the otherwise blocked funds of the emigrating Jewish capitalist, who got his money in Palestinian currency upon arrival. German goods “poured into Palestine” and were supplemented with barter agreements: Palestinian oranges for German machinery, cars, pumps, etc. When the Nazis instituted a boycott against Jewish business and professions in 1933, anti-Nazi Jewish organizations tried to organize a counter-boycott. But “the Zionists’ signature of the Ha’avara agreement effectively sabotaged this hope”, and “Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods ‘made in Germany’.” The Zionist Federation of Germany told a senior Nazi offiical that “the propaganda which calls for boycotting Germany… is by its very nature completely un-Zionist.” The financial value of Ha’avara operations kept growing, from 1.2 million marks in 1933 to 31.4 million in 1937. By its end, the Ha’avara agreements had moved about 140 million marks. 

When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, outlawing marriages between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, a member of the Zionist Executive, Menahem Ussishkin, quoted in Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million, said there was “something positive in their tragedy, and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.” Ussishkin had told Zionist leaders in Poland in 1920 that they should only send to Palestine migrants who were “physically healthy in the full sense of the word. Weak people who are ill with nervous diseases, tuberculosis and others are coming to us, and I don’t have to explain to you the disaster such wretched people will bring down on the Yishuv.” (quoted in Greenstein, Zionism during the Holocaust). 

In the 1988 book The Hidden History of Zionism, peace activist Ralph Schoenmann writes: “the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the SS Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism.”

Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the SS Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into “two categories.” The Jews he favored were the Zionists: “Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.“ 

In 1937, the Labor Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the SS Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah. Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann: “Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs.”

After 1938, the Nazis focused on inducing Jewish emigration from Germany. Citing Jon and David Kimche’s book The Secret Roads, Yahya describes a series of meetings between Zionist envoy Moshe Bar Gilad and Adolf Eichmann, who agreed to provide agricultural training for young Jews to prepare them for life in Palestine: “By the end of 1938 about a thousand young Jews were undergoing training in these Nazi provided camps.” Yahya continues: “The agreements which these envoys reached through their contact with the Gestapo and SS, whereby Nazi Germany made a vital contribution towards reinforcing Zionism’s manpower, training and consequent military effectiveness, were not an informal arrangement. They were solemn agreements officially, though secretly, entered into by the Nazi government: an alliance of convenience ordered in a policy directive by Hitler himself.” 

A passage from The Secret Roads quoted by Yahya makes one thing clear: the Zionist envoys were not in Germany “to save German Jews: that was not their job. Their eyes were fixed entirely on Palestine… They were looking for young men and women who wanted to go to Palestine because they wanted a national home of their own and were prepared to pioneer, struggle and, if necessary, fight for it.” 

Hitler and the Nazis abandoned emigration and opted for extermination in 1941 after they attacked the USSR, trapping millions of Jews within their occupied territories. 

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews fought the Nazi invaders in the Red Army; thousands of others fought guerrilla style as partisans; many others fought and died in urban combat in ghetto revolts. 

Meanwhile the Zionists saved their strength for the fight with the Palestinian Indigenous people that they knew was coming after the war. “When the war was in its closing stages, the Zionists dropped 31 parachutists in Nazi-occupied countries, but their task was to organise further emigration to Palestine rather than resistance to Nazism.” 

Saving the selected few from Weizmann and Ben Gurion to the Kastner Affair and the Eichmann Trial

Chaim Weizmann had said in 1937: “From the depths of this tragedy I want to save two million young people… The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world… Only the branch of the young shall survive… They have to accept it.” 

If this quote makes Weizmann sound particularly ice-cold, know that Ben-Gurion said much the same in 1938: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.” 

Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to the Zionist executive on December 17, 1938 that made this view even more stark. “Britain is trying to separate the issue of refugees from that of Palestine. It is assisted by anti-Zionist Jews. The dimensions of the refugee problem demand an immediate, territorial solution; if Palestine will not absorb them, another territory will. Zionism is endangered… the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda… we are risking the existence of Zionism.” 

To mitigate the risk, the Zionists put Yitzhak Greenbaum in charge of one of the rescue committees – this agent, in charge of rescuing European Jews, put the goal of colonizing Palestine first: “when they come to us with two plans – the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land – I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land… If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food (for starving Jews under Nazi rule) with the money of the United Jewish Appeal… would we do such a thing? No! And once again no!” Yahya notes that Yitzhak Greenbaum’s son Eliezer also notoriously worked with the Nazis in Auschwitz. 

One of the Zionist militias, the Irgun-Stern faction (the so-called Stern Gang), authored a document in 1941 that stated that “the evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries…” Irgun expressed the opinion that “Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people… the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis and bound by a treaty with the German Reich would be in the interest of maintaining and strengthening the future German position of power in the Near East.” The Stern Gang fought the British; when Stern died in 1942, his followers established another militia, “Lehi”, whose members murdered UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Bernadotte had, Yahya notes, “played an important role in WW2 rescuing Jews from Nazi rule and securing them refuge in Sweden.” 

In 1944, Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest concluded a deal with Adolf Eichmann about the fate of the 800,000 Hungarian Jews. Most Hungarian Jews didn’t belong to any organization: they belonged, as Ben Hecht, author of Perfidy, noted, “only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafes.” Nonetheless the Zionists of the Jewish Agency inserted themselves as the negotiators for them. In 1953, Israeli journalist Malchiel Greenwald published a series making the accusation that “Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the Nazis and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine.” Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government for libel, but the judge ruled that libel had not taken place.

Kastner, in his agreement with the Nazis, the judge ruled, had “fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment or prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death.” The judge had been convinced that Kastner had agreed not to help the masses if the Nazis helped him save the “prominents.” 

Besides Eichmann, another Nazi with whom Rudolf Kastner had a working relationship was SS General Kurt Becher. After the war, Kastner told the Nuremberg Tribunal, in the name of the Jewish Agency and Jewish World Congress, that Becher had opposed the Holocaust and saved lives. After this intercession, Becher was released from prison, became one of Germany’s richest men doing trade between Germany and Israel, testified against Eichmann in the latter’s trial (from Germany), and died wealthy. Writer Ben Hecht noted that Becher had joined the Nazi party all the way back in 1934, served as an SS Major and member of the Death Corps, and “distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia.” 

The journalist Malchiel Greenwald had a lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, who had hoped to bring Kastner to trial as a collaborator. But Kastner was curiously assassinated and that loose end tied up. The story was picked up by Israeli journalist Moshe Keren, who wrote that the Kastner trial would “poison the air above us”, that the “state of Israel will never be after this verdict what it was before the verdict.” But the over-inquisitive Keren, too, was assassinated in Germany.

Yahya asked: why was Eichmann tried but not Becher, who was Eichmann’s superior in the SS and just as responsible for the Nazi genocide? Yahya cites Moshe Pearlmann’s book The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann, arguing that the ghost of Kastner was there, “hovering over the courtroom” in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. One of Kastner’s aides, Andre Biss, wanted to clear Kastner’s name by showing that Kastner had been following the guidance of the whole Zionist movement. Biss had been invited to testify, but he was told by the prosecutor (Hausner) “to omit from my evidence any mention of… the Kastner affair. Furthermore I should not speak of Becher’s activities… I told him I could not give evidence unless I was free to tell the whole truth. Hausner finally preferred to dispense with me as a witness.” When Israel executed Eichmann, Yahya notes, they executed “not the most senior surviving Nazi war criminal”, but “probably the Nazi with the most detailed knowledge of the Zionist movement’s relationship with the Nazi regime. All that knowledge died with him.” 

Converging on the view that Jews must not be allowed to have normal Western lives

Both Nazis and Zionists converge on the racist view that Jews are naturally obedient and frightened, that they went to their deaths in the Nazi genocide “like sheep to the slaughter”, as opposed to having a diverse range of reactions like any group of human beings. In fact there was tremendous and heroic Jewish resistance including partisans in Nazi-occupied territories, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the 350-500,000 Jews who fought with the Red Army against the Nazis. In Steven Friedman’s view the falsehood is convenient for Zionism, however, “because it strengthened the false claim that Jews could protect themselves only if they had a state. It also reinforced the notion of the ‘diaspora Jew’ as a lesser form of Jew compared to those who relied on states and armies.”

Zionists claim the rationale for the state of Israel is as the refuge of Jews facing persecution. “But”, Friedman notes in the previously mentioned Good Jew, Bad Jew, “the Zionists saw any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe’s Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.”

The convergence between Nazis and Zionists on the question of whether Jews can live in Europe runs counter to the revealed preferences of Jews, who want to live in the West. When the USSR collapsed, hundreds of thousands of Jews wanted to migrate to the West. Zionists negotiated to get Germany close their doors to them and to prevent Soviet Jews from getting to other countries like the US, denying Jewish wishes, keeping Germany, the birthplace of European Nazism and once its strongest proponent, from accepting more Jews, and ensuring that the “human material” (a dehumanizing way Zionists referred to Jews, on which more later in the series) went to colonize Palestine. 

In summary: The historical convergence of Nazism (the ultimate anti-Jewish ideology) and Zionism (also an anti-Jewish ideology), is based on a shared embrace of: 1. Race science and racial hierarchies; 2. Anti-communism; 3. The notion that Jews cannot be allowed to live normal lives as Jews in Eastern Europe, the US, Canada, etc., and their presence is a problem, whose ‘solution’ could be sending them to colonize Palestine. At Hanukkah at the White House in 2023, Biden restated this Zionist thesis when he said that “no Jew in the world would be safe without Israel”, a horrible thing for a US President, whose government is ultimately responsible for the safety of millions of American Jews, to say. 

Many have wondered why Israel has such good relations with far-right, Nazi-adjacent or aligned movements in Europe; why anti-Jewish politicians in Europe march under the Israeli flag or salute Netanyahu. The answer is tragic and simple: ideological convergence. 

If tsarist Russia had an official in charge of antisemitism, it was Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, who implemented anti-Jewish policy measures, enforced the ghetto limits, and organized actual pogroms like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.

Plehve had a correspondence with and a meeting with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. Another tsarist minister, Count Witte, met Herzl as well. Witte told Herzl “If it were possible to drown six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be perfectly happy to do so, but it is not possible, so we must let them live. But we encourage the Jews to emigrate.”

The tsarist Russian pogroms saw many Jews trying to flee, and most wanted to go to Western Europe, including Britain. This was unhappy news for Zionists, who wanted the Jews to go to Palestine, and unhappy news for Britain’s aristocratic antisemites, who didn’t want more Jews in Britain. Faris Yahya, in his 1978 book Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, relates that Herzl gave evidence to Britain’s Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902 and 1903, where Herzl “called for the stream of migration to be diverted away from Britain.” Herzl also met up with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, who spoke publicly in 1904 about how Zionism was a good idea – and more Jewish migration to Britain, a bad one.

Then there’s Lord Arthur Balfour, who authored the declaration offering Palestine to the Zionists on behalf of the British Empire in 1917. Balfour spoke to Parliament against Jewish immigration: “It would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen, but only intermarried among themselves.”

Another Balfour quote along these lines, quoted by Richard Silverstein:

“For as I read its [Zionism’s] meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason it should receive our support.”

The only Jewish member of the British Government, Sir Edwin Montagu, opposed the Balfour declaration: “I assert that there is not a Jewish nation,” he said. “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants.”

Not only did Herzl disagree with Montagu, but he believed, according to Hannah Arendt (quoted by Faris Yahya) that anti-Semitism could be “used in the same way that boiling water is used to produce steam power.” Anti-Semitism to Herzl was “an overwhelming force.” Jews “would either have to make use of it or be swallowed up by it.” Herzl himself wrote that “the governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”

Herzl had some hair-raisingly anti-Semitic quotes flowing from his own pen: “We, the Jews, not only have degenerated and are located at the end of the path, we spoiled the blood of all the peoples of Europe … Jews are descended from a mixture of waste of all races.”

Writer Yarden Katz wrote about Herzl’s beliefs in a recent Mondoweiss article:

“Like other Zionists, Herzl viewed Jews as a kind of “degenerate race.” He thought that Jewish communities “produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet,” Jewish agitators that are “rapidly becoming Socialists” and create trouble for governments. Prior to adopting the idea of colonizing Palestine, Herzl thought the best plan for Jews would be mass conversion to Christianity.”

Katz’s article concludes that Zionism is anti-Jewish: “I hope we can move from “not in our name” and the weak reactive claim that “anti-zionism is not antisemitism” to we need to dismantle Israel for our own liberation, and zionism is anti-Jewish.”

Johannesburg-based professor Steven Friedman in his new book Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, anti-Semitism and the assault on meaning, elaborated on Herzl: “In 1882 Herzl agreed with the anti-Semite Eugen Duhring that Jews were crooked, lacked moral seriousness and were parasites.” A play that Herzl wrote, The New Ghetto, was full of anti-Semitic stereotypes. 

Christian Zionist Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888) wrote a book in 1880 calling for the expulsion of the Palestinians emulating the theft of land from Indigenous nations in North America: “the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes, who are confined to their “reserves,” and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population.” Oliphant held the local Jewish population of Palestine in contempt. “It is certainly not among the Jews of Jerusalem that I should look for colonists.” [cited by Yakov Rabkin, What is Modern Israel? pg. 45]

From the Zionist perspective, Jews were raw material for the colonization project (much more on this is ahead in the series). And Zionists were not shy about assessing the material and finding it inadequate. Steven Friedman quotes another early Zionist, Max Nordau, who “wanted Zionism to create ‘a new muscle Jew’ who would fight battles rather than run from them. Even the bodies of most Jews (or, at least most Jewish men) were to him a sign of deformity and decay.” The Russian early labor Zionist Aaron David Gordon (quoted by Steven Friedman) said this about Jews:

“We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost non-existent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other people either.”

“The Jewish people,” wrote Vladimir Jabotinsky in a 1906 pamphlet, “is a very bad people; its neighbors hate it and rightly so… its only salvation lies in a general immigration to the land of Israel.” 

Jabotinsky’s lawyer in his 1920 trial for anti-Palestinian violence was a charismatic Dutch Zionist immigrant named Jacob Israel de Haan. But De Haan became disillusioned with Jabotinsky and began producing anti-Zionist writings for audiences back in Europe. Yakov Rabkin’s 2006 book A Threat From Within: A History of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, tells the story of what happened to De Haan:

“An alliance of Jews, Muslims and Christians for peace stood poised to discredit the minority Zionists, who, imbued with a sense of mission, insisted that they alone spoke in the name of the Jewish people. They ostracized, degraded and insulted De Haan. One incident illustrated the difficulties facing this Western, middle-class Jew who had taken an anti-Zionist position in a highly ideologized society built around fanatical left-wing Russian Zionists. A Dutch tourist related that in the course of a stroll with De Haan through the streets of Jerusalem, several passersby spat upon the ground as they passed: Is this not a sign of disrespect?” asked the tourist. “Not at all, it’s a sign of respect for you; had you not been with me, they would have spat in my face.”

De Haan was assassinated by Zionist agents in 1924 shortly after returning from London. The threat he posed? “The Zionists feared that De Haan would succeed in setting up a rival organization comprised of leading rabbis who would reject the nationalist ambitions of the Zionist movement and establish cooperative relations with Arab leaders.”

In summary: The founders of Zionism expressed extremely racist views about Jews; they agreed with pre-Nazi European anti-Semites in the racist belief that Europe ought to be “cleansed” of Jews, who were believed by both Zionists and anti-Semites to be a “foreign body” of parasitic socialist agitators to be gotten rid of, better “implanted” in a colony somewhere.

The Zionists were more than willing to kill Jews like De Haan on the road to winning their colony. As we’ll see in the next instalment, the Zionists turned out to have a very high tolerance for the sacrifice of Jewish lives for the sake of their project.

“The Jews came to Zionism long after the Christians”, Yakov Rabkin writes in What is Modern Israel?

Christian Zionism precedes 19th-century Zionism, and is based on a particular Protestant reading of specific, violent passages of the Bible that were used to justify genocide against Indigenous people in the Americas by American settlers before being used by the 20th century Zionist movement.

 US-based professor Samuel Goldman summarized some of his work on Christian Zionism in “The Real Reason Americans Support Israel”, a 2019 Tablet Magazine article.

The Christian Zionist literary story begins either late in the 1500s or early in the 1600s. The colonization of the Americas is underway and an apocalypse of disease and genocide is very much being unleashed upon the Indigenous peoples there (to get a sense of that, David Stannard’s book American Holocaust is a good starting point). The genocide in the Americas was justified in Biblical terms, using the same passages of Genesis and Joshua that Zionists find so useful.

In England, Thomas Brightman wrote the 1611 book Revelation of the Revelation, Henry Finch in 1621 wrote The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews, and with them of all Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth to the Faith of Christ. Both men believed that for the Jews to return to Palestine would accelerate the Apocalypse. In 1643, Isaac La Peyrere, a Huguenot Calvinist of Jewish background wrote Du Rappel des juifs – about a Jewish return to Palestine and facilitating the Second Coming. 

In 1649, Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright petitioned the Thomas Fairfax Council of War for Jewish re-entry to England (as a path for return to Palestine). “this Nation of England, with the Inhabitants of the Nerther-lands, shall…transport Izraells Sons & Daughters in their Ships to the Land promised to their fore-Fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for an everlasting Inheritance.”

Anglo-American Zionism continued with Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) attempting to convince British rabbi David Levi (1740-1799) to “organize a transfer of Jews to Palestine”. Levi, however, “rejected the idea of reinstating the Jews in the Holy Land by material means and affirmed that the Jews must accomplish their mission in their countries of residence.” 

Anglican preacher John Nelson Darby (1801-1882) formulated the “premillennial dispensationalist” doctrine. His sect was the Plymouth Brethren, and he founded a sub-group of bible students called the Exclusive Brethren. Darby read the bible and believed the Rapture was coming. For those who don’t know, the Rapture is when all the dead Christians will be resurrected, all the living Christians will join them, and they all ascend to heaven together. Before this, there will be violent years of tribulation for Christians on earth who live through the end times, with the rise of the Antichrist, the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Israel and the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer there. This view of the bible, reading it as a codebook for future events (also called futurism) is novel – Catholics, for example, don’t learn it. But it is mainstream in American evangelical Christianity and has been popularized by the mega-bestselling Left Behind series of books (80 million copies), video games, and movies.

Unfortunately for the Americans of a century ago, the Left Behind multimedia experience was unavailable. The Left Behind of 1909 was the Scofield Bible – in fact, the Scofield Bible is the 19th century Left Behind and the Christian version of Theodore Herzl’s 1896 book The Jewish State. It’s an important book.

Civil War Confederate veteran Cyrus Scofield was a Missouri lawyer after the war, then an elected Congressman in the Kansas House of Representatives, a corrupt US District Attorney for Kansas – forced to resign for stealing political contributions, forging signatures, and taking bribes, and a family man who abandoned his first wife and children. After his checkered career in public service, Scofield found religion and became a minister. In 1909 Oxford University Press published his Scofield Reference Bible with his own annotations, which explained the biblical passages in terms of Darby’s premillennial dispensationalist visions. The Scofield Bible sold millions of copies.

The previous generation had their own Left Behind series – another mega-bestseller (28 million copies) futurist geopolitical fiction mapping Darby’s doctrines on to the 1970s it was called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. Lindsay’s genius was to update versions of the book as America’s enemies changed. In 1970, the threat to Israel came from Russia; by the 1990s, it was a joint Russia-Muslim operation; by 1999, China was in there too. “It is amazing, is it not”, wrote Lutheran critic of Christian Zionism Joseph Neuberger in his Master’s thesis, “that the great enemies of God’s people just happen to coincide with the national enemies of America at any given moment?” In the Christian Zionist reading of the bible, unlike non-Zionist Christian readings, “Israel” means the state of Israel – this is to be read literally. But Israel’s enemies in the bible are tribes (Canaanites, etc.) that don’t exist any more – these enemies have to be read figuratively and flexibly, which the Lindsay and the Left Behind authors do.

Befitting a story about Christian Zionism specifically, there’s a trinity of key Christian Zionists: Scofield, Darby, and William Blackstone, who believed that America had the special role of fulfilling the Zionist dream. Blackstone’s mega-bestseller was a pamphlet published in 1898 and called, simply, Jesus is Coming.

He was described by Justice Brandeis in 1916 as “the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl.” Addressing the Provisional Committee in 1916, Justice Brandeis called Blackstone “the “most important ally which Zionism has in America outside the Jewish rank”, reminding the audience that Blackstone had sent a petition 25 years before to the US president asking him to “use his influence to consider Jewish problems with a view to the giving of Palestine to the Jews.” Blackstone was honored again in 1918: deep in the post-Reconstruction nadir of the Jim Crow US, when lynchings and race riots occurred in impunity, a Zionist meeting in Los Angeles honored Blackstone, who explained his theological view to the assembled Zionists (quoted in Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891-1948, pg. 62) :

“[There are] only three courses open to every Jew … The first is to become a true Christian, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, which brings not only forgiveness and regeneration, but ensures escape from the unequaled time of tribulation which is coming upon all the earth … Second – become a true Zionist and thus hold fast to the ancient hopes of the fathers, and the assured deliverance of Israel, through the coming of their Messiah, and complete national restoration and permanent settlement in the land which God has given them. It is true that this leads through unequaled sorrows, as prophesied notably by Jeremiah … [Third – there is the way of] the assimilants. They are the Jews who will not be either Christians or Zionists. They wish to remain in the various nations enjoying their social, political, and commercial advantages … Oh, my Jewish friends, which of these paths shall be yours? … God says that you are dear unto Him … He has put an overwhelming love in my heart for you all, and therefore I have spoken thus plainly. Study this wonderful Word of God … and see how plainly God Himself has revealed Israel’s pathway unto the perfect day.”

Hal Lindsay was also a televangelist, and the super-popular Christian Zionist televangelists Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and of course John Hagee also keep the spirit of Christian Zionism alive through daily sermons. Hagee — who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on Americans for supporting Israel’s 2005 abandonment of the Gaza settlements — uses his pulpit to preach to Americans not to allow any Israel to make any negotiations or compromises (quoted in Neuberger): “God says when you divide up my land, or cause it to be divided up, I will bring you into judgment. And right now the peace process that we call the Road Map to Peace is forcing Israel to divide up the land that God has given to the Jewish people. And God’s response is ‘I am going to bring judgment on the nation that does this.’ I am going to say this without blinking. If America continues to force Israel to give up land to the enemies of Israel, the judgment of God will come to America in unprecedented portions.”

Hagee’s declarations are not unique for Christian Zionism. Theology professor Brad Harper in a 2011 article “Apocalypse Soon? Premillenarianism and Popular Responses to Zionism: A Brief History” quotes the final declaration of an Israel-sponsored Christian Zionist conference in Switzerland 1996.

“According to God’s distribution of nations, the Land of Israel has been given to the Jewish People by God as an everlasting possession by an eternal covenant. The Jewish People have the absolute right to possess and dwell in the Land, including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan.

“Because of the sovereign purposes of God for the city, Jerusalem must remain undivided, under Israeli sovereignty, open to all peoples, the capital of Israel only and all nations should so concur and place their embassies there.

It would be an error for the nations to recognize a Palestinian state in any part of Eretz Israel.”

It is apparent that God’s will coincides perfectly with joint US/Israel geopolitical ambitions.

Brad Harper’s article, “Apocalypse Soon?” concludes by noting some passages of the bible that the Christian Zionists don’t seem to cling to as closely: “The same passages that speak of God’s future blessings to Israel also speak of his blessings upon Egypt and Assyria… in the biblical story of creation, we are told that all people are valuable because they were created in the image of God— and, in the New Testament story of salvation, we are told that God sent Jesus Christ into the world not just for Israel, but for the whole world.”

Now. What, in all this, is anti-Jewish?

(Beyond trying to bring about the end of the world, which would be anti-Jewish because Jews are part of the world?)

(Beyond blocking any negotiated peace options, which would save lives including Jewish lives, by invoking God’s will?)

(And beyond Blackstone’s notion that Jews should either follow the hopeless dead-end of assimilation, or the productive roads of Zionism or conversion to Christianity?)

Beyond these three points there is a specific element of this theology that states that when Jesus does return to earth, the Jews that are here will either convert to Christianity en masse or die as sinners.

So, while Christian Zionists believe that America has a divine mandate to protect the State of Israel, their end goal is the end of the world and the mass conversion or death of all Jews. Israel’s cynical statesmen play along because to them the bible and the fools who believe in it are mere tools. The Christian Zionists, meanwhile, understand Israel to be their tool – in bringing about the Apocalypse.

Christian Zionism is the original type of Zionism and is an anti-Jewish doctrine. 

Now some news notes in case you missed them – images from the past few days – one point of no return after another.

The United Nations, whose utter uselessness has been exposed through this conflict, unable to name the perpetrator as Israel mocks the organization, murders its personnel, bombs its safe zones and sites, just had a Security Council ceasefire resolution vetoed by the US.

The financial times and the Guardian have noted that Israel’s bombing is the most intense bombing in human history and kills the highest proportion of civilians (the Guardian: “The ratio is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century”).

Speaking of historical precedents, Israel is staging stripped and humiliated photos of men they round up and claim they are Hamas – including marking them with numbers and torturing them.

They have been using snipers to kill pregnant women and an elderly woman, Hadiya Nassar, who’d given an interview saying she was older than the State of Israel.

The murder of literature teacher Refaat Alareer, the target had been put on his back by social media figure Bari Weiss (Refaat had said, after the death threats started pouring in, that if he died he held Weiss responsible), looks like it was a targeted assassination. He had apparently “received an anonymous phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer and threatened Refaat that they knew precisely the school where he was located and were about to get to his location with the advancement of Israeli ground troops.”

Max Blumenthal writes: “According to EuroMed’s report, he then returned to his sister’s apartment to avoid endangering others in the school/shelter. There, he was killed by a “surgical” strike by the Israeli military.” Refaat Alareer’s murder was celebrated online by many pro-Israel people, “publicly, under their own names celebrating and cheering the killing of Refaat Alareer and his family which includes children”, as one tweeter noted. His poem, “If I must die”, is being translated into many of the languages of the earth in this twitter thread.

Israel’s military is besieging another school, the Khalifa school in Beit Lahiya (in the north).

And planting the Israeli flag in the ruins.

On one of the telegram channels where Israelis watch the carnage, one poster expressed concern about how the glee would be seen from the outside.

“It’s fun to watch and all,” wrote ben, “but these videos reach social media and portray us as psychopaths who commit genocide while smiling and laughing. I don’t know if it’s wise or not, but I’ve come across a lot of posts like this that are used by the enemy.”

[On the very last page of Siegebreakers I wrote: “If this book has sparked a further interest in Israel/Palestine or in Gaza in particular, the reader might find fiction from young Gaza writers to be of particular interest. Atef Abu Saif’s edited collection The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, and Refaat Alareer’s collection Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, are full of beautiful short stories. The Israelis just murdered Refaat and his family in their home. He never knew me but I knew him. This was his course on poetry And his last poem: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale”. I can’t be worthy of Refaat but like him my only weapons are words. So we carry on.]

Zionists revoke anti-genocide Jewish membership and declare them “un-Jews” and herem

A month into Israel’s genocidal campaign, after nearly 10,000 had been killed including around 4,000 children, Zionist writer Avi Mayer, wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post in November announcing the expulsion of non-Zionist Jews from the community. 

Meyer in turn quotes his former employer Dan Elbaum of the Jewish Agency for Israel in North America, advocating the same: “As much as I would not like to give up on a single Jew, I have given up on them. For me, they are deserving of herem (formal exclusion from the Jewish people).” Meyer mentions another column by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, which argues that anti-Zionism is incompatible with being Jewish: 

“The anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood, while undoing decades of identity-building.”

“We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness,” Sharansky and Troy wrote. “They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent… For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist beliefs appears to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavory and unethical ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘colonialist’ baggage.”

And to Sharansky and Troy, the quintessential “un-Jew” was of course a leftist, Rosa Luxemberg. They quote Red Rosa saying: “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” she raged. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Meyer’s column ends with a call to action: 

“The time has come to regard these individuals and groups as having separated themselves from the Jewish community and the Jewish people. As we at the Post wrote in an editorial on the subject this week, “anti-Zionist Jews are not representative of the Jewish community and they don’t speak in its name. They are as Jewish as the Westboro Baptist Church is Christian.” While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.”

For those Jewish people targeted by the Jerusalem Post column, the cry of “Not in Our Name!” is no longer the point. They aren’t doing it in the name of these Jewish people: Zionists have declared that anti-Zionists have not merely deviated – they are no longer Jews at all.

Being declared “un-Jews” has consequences. In the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, protesting orthodox Jews were beaten by police in dramatic scenes on November 1.

Scenes of Jews protesting in New York’s Grand Central Station and in Oakland, among other places – the kinds of acts that have led to their apparent expulsion from Jewishness by Zionists – have also led to scenes of mass arrests of Jews by police:

Oakland

New York

The other Abrahamic religions have been through sectarian splits: Sunni and Shia in Islam; Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant in Christianity; if, as some tongue-in-cheek socialist writers have argued, that communism too is a form of Abrahamic religion, then Trotskyism and Stalinism could also be considered sects, products of doctrinal split or schism. 

With the rise of the Islamic State (“ISIS”) after 2015, Middle Eastern analysts labeled as “takfiri” the ISIS declaration that Shia, Alawi and other sects to be non-Muslim. The outcome of this analogous “herem” effort by Zionists to expel anti-Zionists will not likely be a successful expulsion, but it could lead to a split, with both sides laying claim to the Jewish identity. 

Herem. Recall that Elbaum, quoted by Meyer, suggested that anti-Zionists were worthy of herem. The concept of herem has connotations well beyond “formal exclusion from the Jewish people”. Baylor University religion professor Philip Jenkins writes about “herem warfare” in the 2014 book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore The Bible’s Violent Verses.

From Chapter 1:

“Herem, usually interpreted as “utter destruction,” is the single most frightening term in the whole Bible…The noun herem represents a “ban,” but translators use different forms when describing how a city is given this status: it is “devoted” or “accursed” to God, or “set apart for YHWH under a ban.” Few Bible translations accurately give the full connotations of the language, generally using a phrase such as “destroy utterly,” but the meaning is clear. Every living thing in the doomed city must be destroyed wholly. Any valuables, any gold or silver, must be consecrated to God and given to the priestly caste, to be reserved for ritual use…”

“…In practical terms, this kind of warfare is unconditional, in that defeated inhabitants have literally no chance, no way out, no option to surrender. Once banned, once devoted to God, they cannot win their lives by offering to convert to the faith of the conquerors, to raise an altar to YHWH. They cannot agree to hand over all their possessions, to abandon the land forever. They can’t even voluntarily accept the most degrading form of slavery or sexual submission. They are pledged to death. As the story of King Saul demonstrates, God left no room for waverers or fainthearts. Far from being marginal or incidental to the biblical tradition, this type of genocidal warfare was associated with some of Israel’s greatest heroes, including Moses, Samuel, and Joshua.”

Whatever Elbaum was signaling by using the word, the full implications of herem are terrifying. The influence of the concept on US and Israeli conduct of war is clearly revealed in John Grenier’s book The First Way of War, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s an Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and Israel’s current warfare on Gaza. Jenkins elaborates on its influence:

“While mainstream thinkers constructed well-thought-out ideas of “just war,” placing appropriate limitations on military conduct, extremists sought to restore the ruthless practices of herem and biblical holy war, war without mercy… Christians put their beliefs into practice, basing their actions explicitly on scripture. The resulting violence was at its peak in Europe during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when each faction labeled its (Christian) opponents as Amalekites fit only for slaughter. To take just one example of many, after Scottish Protestants defeated an Irish Royalist army in 1646, their clergy advisers ordered a complete massacre of prisoners. Scots soldiers drowned eighty women and children, while “again and again were the conquerors told that the curses which befell those who spared the enemies of God would fall upon him who suffered one Amalekite [Catholic] to escape.” Everyone is an Amalekite or a Canaanite to somebody.”

In her book The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible, scholar Rachel Havrelock talks about herem as well.

Havrelock writes that “The specific tactic of Joshua’s holy war is the ḥērem, the ban on goods confiscated from the enemy that also implies total destruction of life (Josh 6:17–19).”

What this boils down to is that leading Zionist intellectuals in important journals are willing to cast out those Jews who have a different political standpoint – cast them out into the status of herem, worthy of ‘unconditional warfare’ of the type that Israel is currently waging on Gaza. The Zionist stance on dissenting Jews is notably not “right or wrong, these are our people”; it is not Voltaire’s “I despise what you say but I will defend your right to say it”; it is “you are hereby declared herem.” The declaration offers another moment to reflect on the anti-Jewish nature of Zionist ideology.