Palestine Tet – 27 – The Anti-Semitic Hustle

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(The) Israeli military is knowingly turning Gazan hospitals into morgues. Attacked by Israeli bombs, artillery, snipers—babies, patients, doctors, nurses and people seeking refuge are being slaughtered. Bodies piled up, rotting in the sun, being eaten by stray dogs. Biden supports. -R

@RalphNader

In a sane society, this self-victimization from Israel apologists would be unacceptable. Imagine the bigotry it must take to cheer the mass murder of Palestinians — massacred from every direction — and still make yourself the victim.

Aaron Mate

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Although it is an old canard, attacking (it is more than criticizing!) a person for criticizing Israel as “anti-Semitic” still works on many, pressuring them into silence. I’ve seen it so many times over the years – not dozens but hundreds of times – to be able to recognize its psychologically paralyzing effects.

To be labeled “anti-Semitic” even 75 years after the end of World War II suggests the worst kind of racism. The Black Alliance for Peace’s Ajamu Baraka calls it “this antisemitic hustle”. I agree, that’s all it is and all its ever been: an effective hustle that turns the oppressor-oppressed relationship on its head. Works like a charm. Well did work like a charm. It’s potency is slipping some as the world watches Israel – with U.S. funding, weapons and political support – blow Gaza to bits and ethnically cleanse yet another part of Palestine.

Yet many people here blame this shameless slaughter, incremental genocide some are calling it, on Hamas? There’s a name for these mental gymnastics; it’s called blaming the victim, and old and well-tried racist sport.

How it works

Like all hustles, this one is based upon a simple psychological approach. Zionists go on the ideological offensive in order to hide or deny the magnitude of their own racism, their own crimes. Rather than  defending what is indefensible, facing the consequences of the Naqba, the Occupation of the 1967 territories, and literal horrors they have entailed, all  substantiated by facts, by the historical record, the racists accuses the anti-racists of racism!

This mechanism or “hustle” thus defines the narrative and puts the Zionist critic on the defensive.

Those who accept the narrative, accused of racism, are thus forced to defend themselves. The controversy moves away from the crimes of Zionism – apartheid occupation, ethnic cleansing and, now, as the whole world can watch with horror in Gaza – genocide to whether or not a particular individual discriminates against Jews. To be so tainted is to be placed in the orbit of  right-wing racists, fascists of all stripes, those proud of hating Jews. .

The “critique-of-Israel-is-anti-Semitic” charge is magnified considerably by the fact that major Jewish organizations insist on another lie: that Judaism and Zionism are one. It  therefore follows that to criticize or attack Zionism is to attack Judaism itself, thus anti-Semitic. How can Zionism be different from Judaism if so many Jews see the two as fused into one?

The great p.r victory of Zionism and its supporters has been to conflate political Zionism with Judaism as if they are one and the same. The most virulent forms of hatred of Jews is overwhelmingly a European phenomenon. It has a long sordid history rooted in the major forms of Christianity be it Catholicism, Protestantism or the different Orthodox sects. The horrors inflicted on Jews (and others, Soviets, Poles) during World War II were perpetrated overwhelmingly by European racists – Nazis, Italian, Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Banderite fascists in the main.

One of the most cynical aspects of Zionism is the manner in which it transfers the anti-Semitism endemic of Europe onto the Palestinian and Arab peoples. In so doing, Zionism blinds its advocates of the history of crimes that they are committing and provides a pretext, an excuse for Israel to continue along the path of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Some historical considerations

Although anti-Semitism did raise its head in the countries where Sephardic Judaism predominated, it was never with the virulence, utter brutality and persistent longevity of the European Jewish experience. Starting in the 1880s or thereabouts, anti-Semitism exploded throughout Europe intensified by the transition to modern Capitalism, the Dreyfus Affair in France and the series of pogroms throughout the Russian Empire being among the two most prominent – but by no means the only – examples.

Jewish responses to their increasingly precarious and downright dangerous situation took a number of different forms, among them: assimilation which often entailed conversion to Christianity; migration to safer havens, including Western Europe and predominantly to the United States (as did all four of my grandparents); revolution – Jews were/are prominent in both socialist and communist movements and finally Zionism, the creation of a “Jewish State” in Palestine.

Until the end of World War Two, frankly, the Zionist option was not the “option of choice” of European Jewry. Immigration and left radicalization were far more appealing. Assimilation in Europe lost much of its appeal as Germany, a country in which Jewish assimilation was the most pronounced turned to Nazism. The immigration option ended as both the United States and Great Britain slammed the doors shut to Jewish (and other) immigrants after the punitive American Anti-Immigration Laws of 1924 limited southern and eastern European immigration to a trickle. It never recovered.

The vagaries of the Jewish radical experience – it is a mixed record but includes the repression of Jews both in the early years of post WW2 Poland along with Stalin’s anti-Jewish paranoia led to a souring of Jewish sentiment for a revolutionary Jewish option.

That left the Zionist option.

It might sound a little “off the wall” but to define Zionism as a voluntary form of the European ethnic cleansing of Jewry, but that is precisely what it was and remains. Hitler’s “solution” was extermination affected in the einsatzgruppen murders and death camps of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and frankly not dozens but hundreds of concentration camps. But the ethnic cleansing took “milder” and “more gentle” forms: expulsion, either forced or voluntary. Either ways, the Jewish presence was either reduced to next to naught, or completely eliminated.

Nor was it always that way. While the idea of “return to Zion” is a religious ideal that goes back centuries if not millenia, it was a spiritual longing of a people scattered hither and yon by the vagaries, the cruelties of history. Political Zionism is quite different, a form of narrow nationalism based on a racist assumption, that the Jews are “the chosen people”. Political Zionism is not “thousands of years old”. That is utter nonsense meant to suggest that the tensions between Arab and Jew is both historic and intractable.

It is a modern movement founded by Theodore Herzl and his circle at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20 century. The idea that political Zionism is as old as the hills is hogwash, nothing else as is the Zionist claim that ancient Israel was always a “Jewish state.” Zionism wasn’t the only political movement that unjustifyingly claimed ancient roots. The 1911Italian invasion of Libya, an example of rapacious, naked colonial aggression was done in the name of “re-establishing the Roman Empire”.

As Zionism did not have a national sponsor, it had to find one. Herzl was its salesman going to the imperialist/colonial nations of the day to find a sponsor for the Zionist project. While the quest ended with a British sponsor and the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, Herzl had previously lobbied the Ottoman Empire, Germany and France unsuccessfully beforehand. Point here: both the decades prior to its creation and certainly after that, Israel has always served one imperialist master or another: first Britain and since the June, 1967 War, the United States.

Separating anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism

People still don’t get it although it doesn’t like that hard a concept. Political Zionism as it exists in the history and current practices of the Israeli state and its supporters. It is a form of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is based upon the displacement of an indigenous population by a foreign “settler” group, the latter inspired so the theory goes by some higher power, ie, “ordained by God”, “chosen people” “manifest destiny” and other self serving pretexts.

Settler colonialism took a number of forms. The South African Apartheid system, with which Zionism has many parallels. was one form. Another  was French Colonial rule in Algeria – an example not identical to but very close to Zionism. It should be carefully studied as the trajectory of Zionism resembles the fate of the French “colon” experience in many of its aspects. The settlement of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand all fall into the same general category (and all vociferously deny the fact).

The “Chosen” assumes an ethical, even “natural” or genetic superiority to others, the Unchosen”; such a formulation – whether conscious or not – divides people into categories of eugenically fit or unfit, racially superior and inferior. Thus by its very nature it is inherently racist.

Anti-Zionism essentially denies that the Jews (or any other people) are chosen, superior and understand both the concept and its manifestation in the state of Israel as fundamentally racist. Anti-Zionists a part of a global movement against all forms of racial discrimination.

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