How is Israel antisemitic and why does it attack Jews?
The story of the antisemitic basis of Zionism has been told time and again, and it is one that I have written about multiple times in this publication.
This includes the ideological affinity of the foundational Zionist ideas with antisemitism, whereby both believe that European Jews are not European but a separate Oriental people.
They both also hold that Jews should not live among European Christians, that they are indeed a separate race and a separate nation, or as the antisemitic Protestant fundamentalist and Zionist British foreign minister Arthur Balfour described them, "a people apart".
The alliances that the Zionist movement brokered since its inception with antisemitic European politicians and regimes to advance its claims are an inseparable part of the history of the movement.
This legacy of the Zionist movement, however, did not end with the establishment of Israel in 1948.
On the contrary, the new Zionist settler colony institutionalised the antisemitic basis of the movement and insisted that those who oppose Zionism and Israeli antisemitism, whether Jews or gentiles, are the actual antisemites - something that was more difficult to do before 1948, as the majority of Jews were at the time anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
'Jewish' state
First, the Zionists decided to name their new settler-colony "Israel".
As "Israel" has referred in the biblical and Judaic tradition to the descendants of Jacob, or the Jewish people, naming the country "Israel" sought to conflate all Jews with the state of Israel.
Israel's rejection of a 'Declaration of Independence' had to do with the main purpose of Zionism, that the state would represent 'Jewish people' and not only Jewish colonists of Palestine
In doing so, anyone who deigned to criticise Israel would be accused of attacking and criticising all Jews, in their entirety, and not the Israeli government and its racist institutions.
Second, the refusal of Israel to issue a "Declaration of Independence" officially in 1948, even though its propagandists would refer to its official "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel" casually as a "Declaration of Independence", was yet another indication.
The "Declaration of the Establishment of the Jewish State" was named as such after proposals to name it a "Declaration of Independence" were turned down by the Zionist leadership.
The Zionist Palestine Communist Party delegate Meir Wilner proposed that the state be declared "sovereign and independent", but his amendment was turned down.
These proposals were rejected outright in favour of declaring the state "Jewish" and nothing more.
This vehement rejection had to do with the main purpose of Zionism, namely that the state it sought would represent "Jewish people" worldwide and not only the Jewish colonists of Palestine.
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Declaring the state "independent" would have implied that it was independent of world Jewry and, therefore, that it was an "Israeli" rather than a "Jewish" state.
Since Israel's leaders insisted that the Zionist movement must continue its settler-colonial activities even after Israel had been established, as the majority of Jews continued to live outside Israel as they still do today, declaring the country's "independence" might have precluded it from doing so.
Such reasons would be made explicit in subsequent debates about the refusal to officially call the state "independent".
Third, Israel insisted in the Declaration and subsequently that its very establishment of the state was not on behalf of the goals of the Zionist movement, which large numbers of Jews had always opposed, but rather that the creation of a Jewish state was "the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State".
Here again, Israel implicates all Jews whom it does not represent in the establishment of its settler colony on the land of the Palestinians. Thus, if one were to oppose this alleged "natural right of the Jewish people", such a person would be nothing less than a virulent antisemite.
In this manner, Israel arrogated to itself the right to represent world Jewry, who had not granted it such a mandate ever.
All the European powers and the US, which refused to allow Jews fleeing the Nazis to escape to their countries, recognised the Israeli state's new claim to represent all Jews. This step absolved them from the responsibility of taking in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees after World War Two.
Diaspora Jews
The claim to speak for and represent all Jews outraged non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, and even some pro-Zionist Jews in Europe and the US, who insisted that the Zionist movement and Israel were giving ammunition to the antisemites who accused Jews of dual loyalty as a result of this Israeli claim.
American Jewish leaders were very concerned precisely about this dangerous antisemitic claim on the part of Israel.
In 1950, Jacob Blaustein, the president of the American Jewish Committee, signed an agreement with Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to clarify the nature of the relationship between Israel and American Jews.
In the agreement, Blaustein declared that the US was not "exile" but rather a "diaspora" and insisted that the state of Israel did not formally represent Diaspora Jews to the rest of the world.
Blaustein added that Israel could never be a refuge for American Jews. He emphasised that even if the US were to cease to be democratic and American Jews were to "live in a world in which it would be possible to be driven by persecution from America", such a world, he insisted, contrary to Israeli claims, "would not be a safe world for Israel either".
Under pressure by American Jewish leaders, Ben-Gurion, on his part, declared that American Jews were full citizens of the US and must only be loyal to it: "They owe no political allegiance to Israel."
The agreement between Israel and the American Jewish Committee stipulated that "Israel, for its part, recognised the allegiance of American Jews to the United States. It, too, would not meddle in the internal affairs of diaspora Jewry. Individuals who chose to make aliyah were needed and would be warmly welcomed, but those remaining in America would not be disparaged as 'exiles.' Neither American nor Israeli Jews would speak on behalf of the other."
'Self-hating' accusations
The Israelis would not maintain Ben-Gurion's position for long.
Following the June 1967 war and Israel's conquest and occupation of territories from three neighbouring Arab countries, Israel began to demand that all world Jewry support its policies and that they ought to do so uncritically.
If they failed to follow its instructions, it was because they were not proper Jews - a position that was most clearly articulated by Israel's famed South Africa-born foreign minister, Abba Eban.
At a 1972 annual conference in Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, Eban laid out the new strategy: "Let there be no mistake: The New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new antisemitism…the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new antisemitism."
It would take a few decades before the antisemitic formula crafted by Eban would become official policy not only in Israel but across the western world
It would take a few decades before this formula crafted by Eban would become official policy not only in Israel but across the western world.
If gentile critics were castigated as antisemites, at the 1972 conference, Eban described two US Jewish critics of Israel, namely Noam Chomsky and IF Stone, as suffering from a complex of "guilt about Jewish survival".
Their values and ideology, by which he meant their anti-colonialism and anti-racism, "are in conflict and collision with our own world of Jewish values".
Eban's identification of Israeli colonial and racist policies with Jewish tradition and values was part and parcel of Zionism's implication of all Jews in Israel's actions and ideals.
But even Eban's horrifying ex-communication of Chomsky and Stone from the Jewish tradition seems mild today compared to how aggressive Israeli officialdom and its supporters in the West have become since then in declaring Jewish critics of Israel, let alone anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews, as "self-hating Jews" or as antisemites.
One notable example is the targeting of Jewish students and educators over the last two decades for derision and exclusion on college campuses by supporters of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as "self-hating Jews" or Jews who "are abetting the antisemites" because they have been critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights.
Pro-Israel claims
Supporters of Israel have relentlessly attacked Jewish professors who criticise Israel as "self-hating".
Some are appalled that there is "an even larger quantity of self-hating Jews" among those whom they accuse of antisemitism because they support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Zionist rabbis critical of Israeli policies have not been immune either and are labelled "self-hating", as have senior White House aides who are strong supporters of Israel but whom Israel's own prime minister described as "self-hating" when they called on Israel to "freeze" building colonial settlements in the occupied territories.
Yet, supporters of Israel, like American academic Daniel J Elazar, argue that Israel "was founded to rest upon Jewish values", a claim that equates the colonial principles of the Israeli state with Judaism and Jewish identity - an outright antisemitic equation.
The identification of Israel's values and policies as "Jewish", or the belief that its policies are enacted in defence of the Jewish people, extends beyond its American Jewish supporters. Many American Christian fundamentalists support Israel precisely because it is "Jewish".
These Israeli and pro-Israel claims have now been adopted wholesale by the American political establishment as outright truths, which is what allowed US President Donald Trump in December 2018 to tell American Jews at a White House Hanukkah party that his vice president had great affection for "your country".
Israel did not object, nor did its government object to Trump telling another group of US Jews in April 2019 that Netanyahu is "your prime minister".
Trump is not alone.
President Joe Biden's strategy to combat antisemitism includes the American "unshakeable commitment to the State of Israel's right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security. In addition, we recognise and celebrate the deep historical, religious, cultural, and other ties many American Jews and other Americans have to Israel".
Statements like these generalise about all American Jews by ignoring those who do not possess "deep" or even shallow ties to Israel - or whose ties compel them not to support Israel's claims about Jews or its policies towards Palestinians.
Rather than combating antisemitism, such a coupling of American Jews with Israel reiterates Zionist, Israeli and US Christian and evangelical views of Jews, to which many American Jews object.
The allegations that all American Jews support Israel uncritically and that such support is intrinsic to Jewish identity are nothing less than staple antisemitic generalisations.
Jewish identity, like all identities, is plural and varies both religiously and ethnically, let alone geographically, culturally and economically.
Antisemitic formula
Today, an increasing number of American Jews are separating themselves from Israel, its Jewish supremacist regime and its colonial crimes.
They are targeted for their political positions by pro-Israel lobbies and smeared as "self-hating".
The Netanyahu regime's antisemitic insistence that 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism' is now complete
It is not the Jewish or gentile critics of Israel, however, who fail to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. On the contrary, they insist on that separation vigorously.
Indeed, those leading the right-wing pro-Israel campaign on US and European campuses have set one main goal, shared by the Israeli government, for their continuing witch hunt: to do away with any distinction between Judaism, the Jewish people, Zionism and the Israeli government.
It is the very same goal that the founders of Israel insisted on and planned for when they named their settler colony "Israel".
The historical movement from Ben-Gurion's forced acknowledgement in 1950 that American Jews do not owe Israel any loyalty to the post-1967 Israeli official consensus and the Netanyahu regime's antisemitic insistence that "anti-Zionism is antisemitism" is now complete.
This antisemitic formula has now been adopted by the US (including in Congress and by Trump), along with British and European officials. The current goal is to force universities, the student movement, cultural institutions and the media, in sum, everyone, to subscribe to this antisemitic formula - or else.
Jewish and gentile critics of Israel will have none of it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
posted by Satish Sharma at
03:08
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