Zionism-twin of Anti-semitism?

Scan page 11

Tel-Aviv crowds celebrate UN partition plan, 1947 Andrew reviews Tor Greenstein' pamphlet anti-semitis in Jewish Beirut in flames, 1982 the Arab East, but the foul fruit of a movement that set its face against all progress for Jews in Europe.

Zionism began in an age in which quack science looked to physiology for many of its answers. Phrenology and palmistry aspired to be scientific pursuits, and theories were developed according to which criminal behaviour was the outcome of certain physical features.

Thus Pinsker, a pioneer Zionist, could write in 1882 that 'Judophobia is...' a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.

Herzl came to the same conclusion as Pinsker: the Jews were not to be assimilated; gentile society rightly rejected them. So they had to become a colonising force which, under the protection of A5./0 imperialist-colonialist powers, would create a Jewish state.

In his diaries, Herzl wrote, 'In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism. ' With blackhearts like von Plehve and Witte, early Zionism shared the assumptions that racial persecution was inevitable - and the view that socialism was to be opposed.

Tony Greenstein quotes from Herzl's diaries again: 'Herzl told von Plehve, 'Help us faster to land and the revolt will end. So will the defection (of Jews) to the socialist ranks." ' Two decades on, Zionism proved no less intransigent in its attitude towards u ANS revolutionary socialism. The Zionist Organisation in Palestine in 1921 was glad to see the arrest and deportation of leaders of the Jewish Communist Party by the British authorities.

Three: years later the fledgling Histadrut (the Jewish 'trade union' movement in Palestine and then Israel) expelled members of the Palestine Communist Party.

Collaborated

Even those trends within Zionism which claimed to be socialist collaborated with the British both against the Arabs and against Jewish revolutionaries. l'he petty-boureois nationalist 'socialism' of these trends gloried in psuedo-radical phrases concerning 'liberation of the land' and 'non-exploitation of Arab labour' , when all this meant was the snatching of land from those who actually worked it and debarring Arabs from employment.

The contradiction between the radical phrases and the reactionary reality is well-brought out in this quotation from David HaCohen, a leading Labour Zionist.

'I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism to defend the fact that I would not allow Arabs in my Trade Union..: to detend preaching to housewives I that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish had bought... to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the 'benefactor' - to do all that was not easy...' The image of the Nazi daubing Jewish shops with the slogan 'Don't buy Jewish' here finds its grotesque parallel in the Jewish 'socialist' ruining the Arab crops and telling Jewish housewives 'Don't buy Arab' But Zionism did not simply replicate some features uf German anti Semitism, it collaborated with it.

The Nazis were well aware that the Zionists were not their enemies. In 1935 Heydrich ordered 'the activities of the Zionist orientated youth organisations are not to be treated with the same strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German Jewish organisations (the assimilationists) ' • In line with this policy the Zionists weie put in control of Jewish representative bodies, because, as Hanna Arendt put it, 'according to the Nazis, Zionists were the decent Jews since they too thought in "national terms'?' A Jewish police-force was established to bring in those unwilling to be sent to concentration camps.

Holocaust

Through the period of the holocaust, the Zionist organisations set out not to rescue jews but to rescue Jews - preferably young ones - who wanted to go to Palestine.

The Jewish Agency consciously decided in the midst of the most terrible carnage the world had ever witnessed that they should concentrate on making propaganda for a Jewish state rather than give aid to Jews in desperate need.' As an exchairperson of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee wrote in The Times in 1961: 'My experience in 1942/3 was wholly in favour of a JUM British readiness to heln openly, constructively, and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only form of help.' (My emphasis - AH)

•Hopes At every stage Zionism, while it reflected the emancipatory hopes of some dews, sided with reaction, refused to rally resistance and played an ignominious part in ensuring that there could be no escape •... except via Palestine.

Tony Greenstein's pamphlet provides irrefutable evidence of the reactionary nature of Zionism in terms of the interests of Jews. He takes for granted that the colonising pro-imperialist project of Zionism had wholly reactionary results for the people of the Arab East, above all the Palestinians.

The weakness of the pamphlet arises out of its initial intention - to reply to the jibes coming, for the most part, from Jews. In attempting to counter, the common charges levelled against anti-Zionists by Jews, the author sometimes fails to give a balanced assessment.

For instance, he rightly attacks the nationalist ideas of Zionism. But what makes Zionism reactionary is not its nationalist character alone.

Garvey

After. all, the Garvey movement in America (and beyond) was a profoundly progressive one - despite Garvey's announced intention not to stay to fight American racism but to organise emigration to a 'Negro Zion', despite Garvey's contact with the Ku Klux Klan, and despite a certain inverse racism.

Why - I can almost hear the question being asked by adl me LIkiNetr nonnla 'lila Tainharrit= pick on Jewish national- FANTA MAN UUNUNUTTANU ism? Tony Greenstein isn't sufficiently explicit about what makes Zionism different.

Zionism's unremittingly reactionary character arises out of the fact that:

firstly, it teemed up with imperialism to establish and maintain itself where other national movements fought imperialism to gain liberation;

secondly, because Zionism was a colonial movement of Europeans it inevitably became an instrument for the denial of the national rights of millions of Arabs;

thirdly, unlike Garveyism, for instance, it did not draw hundreds of thousands - even millions -into political struggle but out of it;

and fourthly, its class composition and dependence on Diaspora capital as well as imperialism meant that from the beginning Zionism was virtually devoid of those class contradictions that remain live within nationalist mass movements in spite of their nationalism.

Lastly, because the author is at pains to fling back the accusations of Jews, the pamphlet - its title 'immediately reveals this - is too much concerned to deal with the events of the first half of this century. Too little is said about, say, Zionism in the last ten years.

The last six months have revealed the open collaboration between the fascistinspired Phalange and the Israeli forces; the blitzkrieg and the butchery have reminded less-blinded Israelis of the hellfire of Hitlerism.

Such will always be those living proofs of the nature of Zionism that might be capable of raising a movement to oppose it, stronger and more compelling than the most thorough historical research.

----- pull-quotes -----

housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they