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War in Context:
The last of the Semites
Al Jazeera has removed this article from its website. Al Abunimah
reports: “Massad told
The Electronic Intifada that he had ‘received confirmation’ from his editor at
Al Jazeera English that ‘management pulled the article.’ OK. I guess that means I’ll have to repost the whole article.
By Joseph Massad
Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early
age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of
what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled
anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the
“solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always
advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.
It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew
Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews
of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would
solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages,
including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted
that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must
leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ,
philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as
“Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity
would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews
racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a
giant one.
Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant
Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of
“restoring” Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less
interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the
Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to
British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest
Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to
expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents
of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many
“anti-Semites”, a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after
its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of
Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled
The Victory of Judaism over Germanism.
Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of
Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line
with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the
distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.
Assimilating Jews into European culture
Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from
Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and
that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism. The
reason why Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to
do with their alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and
hence country-based loyalty. In the Romantic age of European
nationalisms, anti-Semites argued that Jews did not fit in the new
national configurations, and disrupted national and racial purity
essential to most European nationalisms. This is why if the Jews
remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could only cause
hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for the Jews
to exit from Europe and have their own country. Needless to say,
religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of
thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews,
cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a
dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from
their European homelands.
The Jewish
Haskalah,
or Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to
assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed
their Jewish culture. It was the Haskalah that sought to break the
hegemony of Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the “Ostjuden” of the East
European shtetl and to shed what it perceived as a “medieval” Jewish
culture in favour of the modern secular culture of European Christians.
Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and Protestant-like variant of Judaism,
would emerge from the bosom of the Haskalah. This assimilationist
programme, however, sought to integrate Jews in European modernity, not
to expel them outside Europe’s geography.
When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr’s anti-Semitic
programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas,
including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were
“Semites”, who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his
foundational pamphlet
Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it
was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who “cause” anti-Semitism and
that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the
course of their migrations”, indeed that “the unfortunate Jews are now
carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already
introduced it into America”; that Jews were a “nation” that should leave
Europe to restore their “nationhood” in Palestine or Argentina; that
Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their
living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages
or a restored ancient national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews
adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists
after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially
from Aryans. As for
Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned.
The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its
precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah
quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular
gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe
but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from
Europe. The
Bund,
or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia,
which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the
convening of the
first Zionist Congress in Basel
in late August 1897, would become Zionism’s fiercest enemy. The Bund
joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform
rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl
from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to
move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United
States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view
Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.
Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts
Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line
with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with
the latter. He declared in
Der Judenstaat that:
“The Governments of all countries scourged by
anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the]
sovereignty we want.”
He added that “not only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration
fund for European Jews, “but also Christians who wanted to get rid of
them”. Herzl unapologetically confided in his
Diaries that:
“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”
Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like
the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw
anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by
design. That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime
Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government’s Aliens Act, which
prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering
Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the “undoubted
evils” of “an immigration which was largely Jewish”, was hardy
coincidental.
Balfour’s infamous Declaration of 1917
to create in Palestine a “national home” for the “Jewish people”, was
designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian
Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants
into Britain.
The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of
pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with
the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous
Transfer (
Ha’avara)
Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to
facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine
and which broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started
by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Zionist envoys were
dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish
colonization of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip
to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the
racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount
Carmel as a guest of the Zionists.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the
Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that
supported the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935,
as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and
separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on
ideological similitude. The Nazis’ Final Solution initially meant the
expulsion of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of
expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created
the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.
While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis
of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not
only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed
the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because
they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and
homes.
After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop
European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of
Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a
predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism’s genocidal
programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to
take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust. In
fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the
Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet
these same countries would be the ones who would support the United
Nations
Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.
The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis
The United States and European countries, including Germany, would
continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German
governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their
relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the
establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government
(and every German government since unification in1990) has continued the
pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi
pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of
Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up
in a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would
explain that much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help
offset the costs of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country.
After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and
Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white
Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was
essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s,
Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of
Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented
people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who
should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to
depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European
Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious),
contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them.
Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of
European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the
millions who were
different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the
same as European Christians.
This explains why in a country like the United States, which had
nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards
of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of
Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African
Americans for which the US is responsible.
Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech on colonialism, he
affirmed that the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that
it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning
barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes,
but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its
accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on
them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it,
because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples;
that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it,
and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation
in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European
colonialism turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation
of Nazism’s victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice
would continue their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people
around the world, on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on
Indonesia, on Central and South America, on Central and Southern Africa,
on Palestine, on Iran, and on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of
US Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues
developed the theory of “totalitarianism”, which posited Soviet
Communism and Nazism as essentially the same type of regime, European
Jews, as victims of one totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity
exhibition that American and West European propaganda claimed was like
the atrocities that the Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the
pre- and post-War periods. That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by
accusing the Soviets of anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet
Jewish citizens to self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the
propaganda.
Commitment to white supremacy
It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy
was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of “white”
people, and what came to be called “Judeo-Christian” civilisation.
European and American policies after World War II, which continued to be
inspired and dictated by racism against Native Americans, Africans,
Asians, Arabs and Muslims, and continued to support Zionism’s
anti-Semitic programme of assimilating Jews into whiteness in a colonial
settler state away from Europe, were a direct continuation of
anti-Semitic policies prevalent before the War. It was just that much of
the anti-Semitic racialist venom would now be directed at Arabs and
Muslims (both, those who are immigrants and citizens in Europe and the
United States and those who live in Asia and Africa) while the erstwhile
anti-Semitic support for Zionism would continue unhindered.
West Germany’s alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of
supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and
military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to
kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance
that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s. In
the 1960s, West Germany even
provided
military training to Israeli soldiers and since the 1970s has provided
Israel with nuclear-ready German-made submarines with which Israel hopes
to kill more Arabs and Muslims. Israel has in recent years armed the
most recent
German-supplied submarines
with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, a fact that is well known to the
current German government. Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak told
Der SPIEGEL
in 2012 that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the
existence of the state of Israel “for many years”. Berlin financed
one-third of the cost of the submarines, around 135 million euros ($168
million) per submarine, and has allowed Israel to defer its payment
until 2015. That this makes Germany an accomplice in the dispossession
of the Palestinians is of no more concern to current German governments
than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer who
affirmed that “the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the
responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees”.
This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to
the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel
and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was
anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis. The current German
government does not care about the fact that even those German Jews who
fled the Nazis and ended up in Palestine hated Zionism and its project
and were hated in turn by Zionist colonists in Palestine. As German
refugees in 1930s and 1940s Palestine refused to learn Hebrew and
published half a dozen German newspapers in the country, they were
attacked by the Hebrew press, including by
Haaretz, which
called for the closure of their newspapers in 1939 and again in 1941.
Zionist colonists attacked a German-owned café in Tel Aviv because its
Jewish owners refused to speak Hebrew, and the Tel Aviv municipality
threatened in June 1944 some of its German Jewish residents for holding
in their home on 21 Allenby street “parties and balls entirely in the
German language, including programmes that are foreign to the spirit of
our city” and that this would “not be tolerated in Tel Aviv”. German
Jews, or Yekkes as they were known in the Yishuv, would even organise a
celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday in 1941 (for these and more details
about German Jewish refugees in Palestine, read Tom Segev’s book
The Seventh Million).
Add to that Germany’s support for Israeli policies against
Palestinians at the United Nations, and the picture becomes complete.
Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005
maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this “Memorial to the Murdered Jews
of Europe” is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today
be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews
who also fell victim to Nazism. That a subsidiary of the German company
Degussa, which collaborated with the Nazis and which produced the
Zyklon B gas
that was used to kill people in the gas chambers, was contracted to
build the memorial was anything but surprising, as it simply confirms
that those who killed Jews in Germany in the late 1930s and in the 1940s
now regret what they had done because they now understand Jews to be
white Europeans who must be commemorated and who should not have been
killed in the first place on account of their whiteness. The German
policy of abetting the killing of Arabs by Israel, however, is hardly
unrelated to this commitment to anti-Semitism, which continues through
the predominant contemporary anti-Muslim German racism that targets
Muslim immigrants.
Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition
The
Jewish holocaust killed off
the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European
anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining
“Semites” who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today
are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do
not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have
always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European
countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from
its very anti-Semitism. Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race
separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European
Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine,
its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European
allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to
convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe
as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews
are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is
their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews. That the two largest
American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and
secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish
tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th
century imperialism. But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and
steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism.
Israel and its anti-Semitic allies affirm that Israel is “the Jewish
people”, that its policies are “Jewish” policies, that its achievements
are “Jewish” achievements, that its crimes are “Jewish” crimes, and that
therefore anyone who dares to criticise Israel is criticising Jews and
must be an anti-Semite. The Palestinian people have mounted a major
struggle against this anti-Semitic incitement. They continue to affirm
instead that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jews, that it
does not represent all Jews, and that its colonial crimes against the
Palestinian people are its own crimes and not the crimes of “the Jewish
people”, and that therefore it must be criticised, condemned and
prosecuted for its ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people.
This is not a new Palestinian position, but one that was adopted since
the turn of the 20th century and continued throughout the pre-WWII
Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Yasser Arafat’s
speech at the United Nations in 1974 stressed all these points vehemently:
Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the
poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to
carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute, oppressed European
Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist
leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of
aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately
allied to racial discrimination…Zionist theology was utilised against
our Palestinian people: the purpose was not only the establishment of
Western-style settler colonialism but also the severing of Jews from
their various homelands and subsequently their estrangement from their
nations. Zionism… is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets
and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin.
For when what is proposed is that adherents of the Jewish faith,
regardless of their national residence, should neither owe allegiance to
their national residence nor live on equal footing with its other,
non-Jewish citizens -when that is proposed we hear anti-Semitism being
proposed. When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish
problem is that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or
nations of which they have been a historical part, when it is proposed
that Jews solve the Jewish problem by immigrating to and forcibly
settling the land of another people – when this occurs, exactly the same
position is being advocated as the one urged by anti-Semites against
Jews.
Israel’s claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that
its critics believe its claims that it represents “the Jewish people”.
But it is Israel’s claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.
Today, Israel and the Western powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to
an international principle around which they seek to establish full
consensus. They insist that for there to be peace in the Middle East,
Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must become, like the West, anti-Semites
by espousing Zionism and recognising Israel’s anti-Semitic claims.
Except for dictatorial Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority and
its cronies, on this 65th anniversary of the anti-Semitic conquest of
Palestine by the Zionists, known to Palestinians as the
Nakba,
the Palestinian people and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews continue
to refuse to heed this international call and incitement to
anti-Semitism. They affirm that they are, as
the last of the Semites,
the heirs of the pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against
anti-Semitism and its Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their
resistance that stands in the way of a complete victory for European
anti-Semitism in the Middle East and the world at large.
Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual
History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
Palestinians.
Update:
See :
Al Jazeera deletes its own controversial Op-Ed, then refuses to comment
An excellent rebuttal to the article is
here.
Update 2:
Al Jazeera has since
apologized and
reposted the article.
