With so much going on in the ideologically and perhaps politically crumbing statelet, Israel, it is beneficial and salutary to review what Israel Shahak, arguably the world's best-known anti-Zionist, wrote in Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto Press: London, 1994, pp. 71-72).
Chapter 4: The Weight of History
...[C]lose relations have always existed between zionists and antisemites: exactly like some of the European conservatives, the zionists thought they could ignore the 'demonic' character of antisemitism and use the antisemites for their own purposes. Many examples of such alliances are well known. Herzl allied himself with the notorious Count von Plehve, the antisemitic minister of Tsar Nicholas II; [27] Jabotinsky made a pact with Petlyura, the reactionary Ukrainian leader whose forces massacred some 100,000 Jews in 1918-21; Ben-Gurion's allies among the French extreme right during the Algerian war included some notorious antisemites who were, however, careful to explain that they were only against the Jews in France, not in Israel.
Perhaps the most shocking example of this type is the delight with which some zionist leaders in Germany welcomed Hitler's rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of 'race' and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among 'Aryans'. They congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy - the forces of liberalism. Dr Joachim Prinz, a zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism:
The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk. [28]
The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfillment of our desires'. And further:
We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only (be) honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations. [29]
The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution [30] and great expectations that, in the congenial atmosphere of the myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive.
Of course, Dr Prinz, like many other early sympathizers and allies of Nazism, did not realize where that movement (and modern antisemitism generally) was leading. Equally, many people at present do not realize where zionism - the movement in which Dr Prinz was an honored figure - is tending: to a combination of all the old hates of classical Judaism towards Gentiles and to the indiscriminate and ahistorical use of all the persecutions of Jews throughout history in order to justify the zionist persecution of the Palestinians.
For, insane as it sounds, it is nevertheless plain upon close examination of the real motives of the zionists, that one of the most deep-seated ideological sources of the Zionist establishment's persistent hostility towards the Palestinians is the fact that they are identified in the minds of many east-European Jews with the rebellious east-European peasants who participated in the Chmielnicki uprising and in similar revolts - and the latter are in turn identified ahistorically with modern antisemitism and Nazism.
Notes:
27. Herzl went to Russia to meet von Plehve in August 1903, less than four months after the hideous Kishinev pogrom, for which the latter was known to be responsible. Herzl proposed an alliance, based on their common wish to get most of the Jews out of Russia and, in the shorter term, to divert Jewish support away from the socialist movement. The Tsarist minister started the first interview (8 August) by observing that he regarded himself as 'an ardent supporter of zionism'. When Herzl went on to describe the aims of zionism, von Plehve interrupted: 'You are preaching to the converted'. Amos Elon, Herzel, 'Am 'Oved, 1976 pp.415-9, in Hebrew.
28. Dr Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden, Berlin, 1934, pp. 150-1.
29. Ibid., pp. 154-5.
30. For example see ibid., p. 136. Even worse expressions of sympathy with Nazism were voices by the extremist Lohamey Herut Yisra'el (Stern Gang) as late as 1941. Dr Prinz was, in zionist terms, a 'dove'. In the 1970s he even patronized the US Jewish movement Breira, until he was dissuaded by Golda Meir. <end>
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Thought for the Day:
"Better a Holocaust Denier than a Holocaust Liar."
- Michael Murphy --