A crude attempt to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
"It is time to recognise that Zionism has been a terrible and failed experiment. Its continuation promises only further oppression
for both Palestinians and Israelis and the most bitter war."
"The Sharon government rests upon two fascistic parties, one based on right wing hooligans and thugs that inhabit the
settlements in the Occupied Territories and another that openly promotes the “transfer” of the Palestinians from the West Bank
and Gaza. Its survival is entirely dependent upon the Bush administration and billions of dollars of military aid and loans."
wsws.org
A crude attempt to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
By Jean Shaoul
22 December 2003
A recent article in the British newspaper, the Guardian, provides a noxious example of the concerted effort being orchestrated
by the Zionist political establishment to rubbish all criticism of its murderous policy towards the Palestinian people.
In an op-ed piece headlined Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism: behind much criticism of Israel is a thinly veiled hatred of the
Jews, Emanuele Ottolenghi attempts to equate any opposition to Zionism and the colonial policies of the Israeli state with
hatred of the Jewish people in general and the infamous and reactionary anti-Semitism of the Nazis in particular.
Ottolenghi holds an unpaid post at the privately endowed Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Middle East
Centre at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. But by no stretch of the imagination can his article be described as a scholarly piece
of work. His is an attempt on behalf of Israel’s international backers to silence opposition to Ariel Sharon’s regime and to
legitimise its Greater Israel policy and brutality towards a people who bear absolutely no responsibility for the Holocaust, which
is evoked by Ottolenghi as a bludgeon against Zionism’s opponents.
His article offers total indemnity for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and a carte blanche for Sharon to do whatever he
likes. Using the politics of amalgam, Ottolenghi links anyone who criticises the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, irrespective of
their political views. As far as Ottolenghi is concerned it is impermissible to note that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians
are reminiscent of those employed by the Nazis. Such an equation between victims and murderers, he says, denies the
Holocaust. “Worse still, it provides its retroactive justification for the Holocaust: if Jews turned out to be so evil, perhaps they
deserved what they got,” he continued.
This argument is made up from whole cloth. One does not have to deny the extermination of European Jewry in the Nazi gas
chambers to say that Israel’s dispossession, subjugation and enclosure of the Palestinian people bears a striking resemblance to
the policies of the Nazis towards the Jews, Poles, gypsies, other ethnic minorities and political opponents. To acknowledge this
is not to equate the criminal actions of the Zionists against the Palestinians with the Holocaust, which was on a far greater scale
of barbarism. But it legitimately identifies what is a tragic irony of history—that the Jewish people, so long associated with the
struggle for social progress and against all forms of discrimination, racism and oppression, should themselves be perpetrating
gross human rights violations against an oppressed people. Indeed such comments are often framed as an appeal to the Jews’
sense of history and social conscience—something that will be lost on political criminals such as Sharon and his apologists.
The Sharon government and the Zionist establishment routinely utilise the lie that their opponents are anti-Semitic. Ottolenghi
runs with this by inventing a “counter-argument” from an imaginary accused that reeks of racism.
“Jewish defenders of Israel are then depicted by their critics as seeking an excuse to justify Israel, projecting Jewish paranoia
and displaying a ‘typical’ Jewish trait of ‘sticking together’, even in defending the morally indefensible.”
Later he lists what he claims are anti-Semitic themes used repeatedly by anti-Zionists—“the Jewish conspiracy to rule the
world, linking Jews with money and media, the hooked-nose stingy Jew, the blood libel, disparaging use of Jewish symbols, or
traditional Christian anti-Jewish imagery—are used to describe Israel’s actions”.
Who says this? Ottolenghi never quotes a single concrete example, except for reference to an Italian cartoon and to Labour
MP Tam Dalyell’s reference to a “Jewish cabal” having influence on British foreign policy. This author cannot vouch for the
Italian cartoon he cites, but the World Socialist Web Site has written on the attack made on Dalyell (See “Britain: Labour
extends antiwar witch-hunt to Tam Dalyell”). But the essential message is that all anti-Zionists “repeatedly” resort to crude
anti-Semitic attacks. And he can find no proof of this at all.
Ottolenghi’s claims are fundamentally dishonest and are contradicted by the fact that many of those critical of Sharon’s brutal
treatment of the Palestinians are themselves both Israelis and Jews. To cite but one example, more than 100,000 Israeli Jews,
appalled by Sharon’s actions, attended a rally in November to commemorate the eighth anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzakh Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing zealot. Demonstrators carried banners opposing the occupation and demanding
peace.
He responds to Jewish critics of Zionism in typical fashion, with the claim that they are essentially traitors who are praised by
the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic lobby precisely because they have sold out: “Jews condemning Israel and rejecting Zionism earn
their praise. Denouncing Israel becomes a passport to full integration. Noam Chomsky and his imitators are the new heroes,
their Jewish pride and identity expressed solely through their shame for Israel’s existence.”
The Holocaust and the Zionist state
Here is the hub of Ottolenghi’s argument. To be Jewish is ipso facto to be Zionist. His assertion that anti-Zionism is
anti-Semitism rests on this identification between the actions of the Israeli state and the interests of the Jewish people as a
whole. Such an equation is historically and factually incorrect.
The Holocaust was a seminal historical experience not just for the Jews, but for working people all over the world. It was the
single most grotesque example of fascist barbarism during World War II.
Against the background of the economic ruination of Germany that followed World War I, Hitler set about building a mass
social base for his party among petty bourgeois layers and lumpen workers by scapegoating the Jews for the decline in their
living standards. Hitler certainly utilised populist attacks on Jewish “usurers” and businessmen, but his hatred of the Jews was
bound up with his fear of Marxism and Germany’s powerful socialist workers’ movement in which Jewish workers and
intellectuals played such a prominent role.
The defeat of fascism and the struggle against anti-Semitism was, therefore, bound up with a unified political offensive by the
working class not just against fascism but the entire bourgeois order. But this was prevented from happening by the combined
betrayals of Stalinism and social democracy that disoriented the millions of workers opposed to the Nazis and had allowed
Hitler to come to power.
The Zionists had a very different perspective. They insisted that the anti-Semitism that gave rise to the Holocaust could only be
answered by the removal of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the establishment of their own state. For the
Zionists, the solution offered to the Jewish proletariat and intelligentsia lay in establishing a new capitalist state, not in joining
their class brothers and sisters in the struggle to put an end to capitalism.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 rested upon the decisions and machinations of the major powers at the United
Nations. It was viewed with sympathy by millions of people around the world appalled at the catastrophe that had befallen the
Jews and was accompanied by rhetoric that attempted to identify Zionism with the labour movement, equality and socialism as
a way of legitimising it in the eyes of class conscious Jews. The horrors of the concentration camps thus played a crucial role in
Israel’s birth.
Israel’s historical and political record
But what is at issue now, 55 years later, is the historical and political record of Zionism, an examination of which Ottolenghi
attempts to rule out of bounds. For him any objective appraisal of what the Israeli state has done constitutes rampant
anti-Semitism. This serves a very definite purpose. The inability to examine Israel’s history without the Zionists raising the
spectre of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is not only a slur on the motives of their critics. It makes it impossible to understand
anything politically.
Ottolenghi claims that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic because it singles out Israel to be judged by an “impossibly high
standard” not applied elsewhere. This is a diversion. People have every right to “single out” a country that illegally occupies
Palestinian land and brutally oppresses its inhabitants, particularly when this is only possibly because it has the financial, political
and military backing of the United States—which itself constitutes one of the many crimes of the world’s major imperialist
power.
For him, “Israel errs like all other nations: it is normal”. He says, “Israel deserves to be judged by the same standards adopted
for others, not by the standards of utopia”. The World Socialist Web Site agrees with his last point. Let us examine the record.
Israel’s founding was carried out through the forcible expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people. This was not just the result
of a war that led people to flee their homes, but the explicit policy of the political progenitors of the present Likud
government—the Zionist terror groups—that was given the nod by Israel’s founding fathers and first Prime Minister David Ben
Gurion, as Israeli historians have acknowledged.
Since then Israel has fought numerous wars, including unprovoked wars of aggression against other countries: Egypt in 1956
and Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. Israel has openly defied numerous United Nations resolutions. It has repeatedly breached
international law in relation to the West Bank and Gaza, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. It has appropriated territory
to itself, including East Jerusalem and the land and villages for more than 200 settlements.
Israeli armed forces have carried out repeated incursions into Palestinian cities. They and Zionist settlers have killed more than
2,500 Palestinians, the great majority of which were unarmed civilians and many of them children, since the start of the Intifada
in September 2000.
As one of the most violent governments in the world, Israel has demolished people’s homes, destroyed farms and uprooted
olive groves, closed roads and instituted curfews, crippling the Palestinian economy and bringing people to the brink of
starvation. It regularly detains people without trial. Torture and inhumane treatment of detainees is routine. Israel has exiled
people. It has a declared policy of political assassination of its opponents.
Israel’s policy of closing roads not only to and from but also within the West Bank and Gaza, combined with its infamous
security wall that separates the West Bank from Israel, has created a ghetto for the Palestinians. The conditions for the vast
majority of those who live in the Gaza Strip, separated off from Israel by means an electrified barbed wire fence and denied any
means of earning a living, resemble those of a giant concentration camp.
Israel is a nuclear state that refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty or let international inspectors examine its facilities.
Yet everyone knows that Israel has developed more than 200 such weapons and has an extensive biological and chemical
weapons programme. If Israel’s nuclear weapons have gone unpublicised thus far it is because Israel serves as the custodian of
US interests in the Middle East. It has even said that it will take pre-emptive strike action against Iran, which it claims has begun
to develop nuclear weapons in violation of its international obligations to destroy its nuclear facilities as it did against Iraq in
1981.
The US has bankrolled Israel to the tune of billions of dollars a year for decades in the form of military aid, most of which must
be spent in the US.
Israel is the only country in the world led by a man that its own judicial commission found was personally responsible for failing
to protect the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps from the murderous Phalangist thugs in 1982 and judged him to
be unfit to serve as a minister of state. Sharon heads a government which rests upon ultra-nationalist parties that openly call for
ethnic cleansing under the euphemism of “population transfer”.
Within Israel itself, the government operates a policy towards the Palestinian Israelis reminiscent of the infamous apartheid
regime in South Africa. It discriminates against its Arab citizens, curtails their political rights and denies them a fair share of
economic resources and social welfare. It has recently passed legislation denying Israeli citizens who marry Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza the right to live with their partners in Israel.
The Sharon government does not represent the interests of the majority of the Jewish people who live in Israel, let alone the
Jewish people all over the world. It is the political representative of a section of Israel’s financial elite and a proxy of the Bush
administration in the US.
More than 10 percent of the Israeli workforce is unemployed. Many more are impoverished. The Sharon government is
pursuing a relentless attack on jobs, living standards and the social safety net in an attempt to shift the burden of Israel’s
precipitous economic decline in the wake of the world recession and the impact of the Palestinian Intifada onto the backs of
workers and their families. Finance Minister Benyamin Netanyahu recently announced the introduction of legislation curbing the
right to strike by public sector workers and the gutting of social welfare.
What the record shows is that Israel deserves international condemnation for its flagrant breech of international law and its
brutal and repressive policies.
The Zionist state and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe
Ottolenghi does make one correct point when he admits, “There is no doubt that recent anti-Semitism is linked to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
He quickly retreats from this admission, however, when he goes on to insists that anyone who draws any political conclusions
as to what this says about the character and viability of the Zionist project or does not still lend unconditional support to Israel is
an anti-Semite: “The argument that it is Israel’s behaviour, and Jewish support for it, that invite prejudice sounds hollow at best
and sinister at worst. That argument means that sympathy for Jews is conditional on the political views they espouse. This is
hardly an expression of tolerance. It singles Jews out. It is anti-semitism.”
Unquestionably one of the most potent factors re-igniting anti-Semitism today is the brutal methods adopted by the Israeli
government under Sharon. A leaked European Union report shows a rise in the number of attacks on Jews by European
Muslim youth. The report, compiled by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, links a rise in attacks on
Jews with events in the Middle East, particularly since the start of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 and Israel’s attack
on Jenin in the West Bank in April last year.
To recognise this fact is not to endorse anti-Semitic views or to defend those who hold them. But the political basis for a
dangerous emergence of anti-Semitism amongst often politically uneducated second generation Arab and African immigrants
cannot be ignored. One can only combat such a noxious development by advancing a principled opposition to both the Zionist
state and to those, such as the Islamic fundamentalists and Arab bourgeois leaders, who employ populist anti-Semitism to
manipulate political discontent. Silence on Sharon’s crimes or, worst still an apologia for them as provided by Ottolenghi, only
fosters anti-Semitism.
It also strengthens right-wing forces on a world scale.
The Sharon government rests upon two fascistic parties, one based on right wing hooligans and thugs that inhabit the
settlements in the Occupied Territories and another that openly promotes the “transfer” of the Palestinians from the West Bank
and Gaza. Its survival is entirely dependent upon the Bush administration and billions of dollars of military aid and loans.
There is a growing alliance between the right-wing Zionists and the extreme-right Christian fundamentalists in the US. The
Zionist right has aligned itself—on the basis of anti-Arab chauvinism and military aggression against Iraq—with groups in the
US and also Europe that have a long history of anti-Semitism. Only a few weeks ago Sharon was being entertained by one of
his most ardent supporters in Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy who made headlines and sparked outrage
recently when he came to the defence of Mussolini, the fascist dictator, when he claimed, “Mussolini never killed anyone.
Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.” On November 25 Sharon went one better, playing host to Italy’s
deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the National Alliance, the political heir of Mussolini’s fascist party.
In the mid-1990s Fini was still describing Mussolini as “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.” He now condemns what he
calls “the shameful chapters in the history of our people”. But what really endears him to Sharon is Fini’s support for Israel’s
repression of the Palestinians and the construction of the fence. As far as Sharon is concerned, support for Israel today erases
any whiff of anti-Semitism, even for supporters of fascists that sought the extermination of European Jewry.
That the Zionist state should seek such allies and become one of the major factors spawning anti-Semitism is indeed another of
history’s tragic ironies. Such reactionary outcomes are a far cry from the safe haven, free from oppression and discrimination,
that the creation of Israel appeared to offer Jews in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. But they are the
inevitable product of the Zionist project of establishing a capitalist state created through the dispossession of another people
and maintained by war and repression abroad and social exploitation and inequality at home. It is impossible for such a state to
provide the foundations for establishing social justice and equality, even for its own citizens.
The failure of the Zionist project is not the result of any inadequacies on the part of the Jewish people but an expression of the
failure of all movements in the Middle East, Africa and Asia that have based themselves upon the perspective of nationalism to
resolve the fundamental social, economic and political problems confronting the mass of working people.
It is time to recognise that Zionism has been a terrible and failed experiment. Its continuation promises only further oppression
for both Palestinians and Israelis and the most bitter war.
The only way out of the current impasse is the development of a political movement to unite Arab and Jewish workers and
intellectuals in a common struggle against capitalism and for the building of a socialist society. This provides the only way of
redressing the historic injustices suffered by the Palestinian workers and peasants, and ending the twin evils of oppression and
war that are fuelled by the profit drive of both international capital and both the Israeli and Arab national ruling cliques. The
creation of a United Socialist States of the Middle East would remove the artificial borders imposed by imperialist intrigues that
presently divide the peoples and economies of the region so as to utilise the resources to fulfil the social, economic and political
aspirations of all. |
