Andre’s Reviews > The Myths of Zionism > Status Update

Many Jews from Arab countries ended up in Israel. On their arrival some were sprayed with the insecticide DDT, to rid them of their ‘Arabness’ (Alcalay 1993: 37). This is no exaggeration, and Alcalay has many pages describing what happened.

Wow, that is plain racist. If I had done that I am sure I would be called a Nazi.

Everywhere they ruled in the Middle East, Britain and France deliberately widened the gap between the religious minorities, Jews and Christians and the Muslim majority. This had begun as a political device to undermine the Ottoman Empire by offering different forms of ‘protection’. Then offers of citizenship turned some Jews and Christians into direct agents of the British and French colonial authorities ...

Oh boy, no wonder stuff like Mein Kampf and the protocols of the elders of zion caught on in the middle east. Regarding how the US and Israeli governments acted for decades now, no wonder the slippery slope to belief in a global Jewish conspiracy is so easy in this regard.

The present-day Likud Party...rarely admits this ghost from its past. Yet when...Menachem Begin, visited New York at the end of 1948, he and his political organisation faced an attack...Einstein, as well as many leading American Jews, denounced Begin in the New York Times for leading a party ‘akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’

Ben-Gurion’s attitude had real life-and-death implications. Again in
the same year, he opposed a British plan to allow migration to the UK of several thousand German Jewish children...The assertion of the alleged needs of the Jewish state-in-waiting over the priority of rescue was paralleled in the ways this attitude could not only compromise resistance to the Nazis, but even suggest collaboration.

If this is true, if this ‘life-for-death’ principle really is a feature of our age, the age of atrocity, then Zionism and Zionists need to think very carefully about the lessons they are drawing from the Holocaust. Hasn’t the Zionist enterprise been based, at least in part, on saving Jewish lives at the expense, if necessary, of dead Palestinians?

For some it surely did.

Wouldn’t Zionism itself, far from alleviating anti-Semitism, inadvertently promote it?
As Segev has noted, this is precisely what the Zionists wanted. ‘The anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends, the antisemitic nations will become our allies,’ Herzl had written in his diary.

Churchill had been profoundly disturbed by the Russian Revolution and was convinced that the ‘International Jew’ was behind it. He called the Bolsheviks ‘a bacillus’, an expression frequently applied to Jews in anti-Semiticpublications. ... He believed that the Zionists ‘would provide the antidote to this sinister conspiracy and bestow stability instead of chaos on the Western world’

Zionists also believed that those German Jews who had identified themselves as Germans ‘of the Mosaic faith’, i.e. Germans in terms of nationality and Jewish in terms of religion, were ‘an undesirable, demoralizing phenomenon’

That would explain alot actually.

There was a real irony here. Jewish emancipation political circles identified the roots of peasant anti-Semitism in the ‘middleman’ role Jews had played in the medieval economy.