On Zionism

“To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an antisemite”--Chaim Greenberg, 1942

This is not a part of the Dead God project, just a quick aside. I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a long time, it’s something that I must say.

Zionism is one of the most profound forms of internalized oppression that have developed in a population. Certainly one of the most damaging to other people. Other nationalisms are movements of belonging: the people of a place asserting their identity tied to the place where they are, where their families have been for as long as memory. And so asserting that colonizers shouldn’t run the show in their own home places.

Zionism, by contrast, developed from an anxious attachment to the place of Jews in Europe. Right-wing Jews and Gentiles alike thought that Jews could never truly belong in Europe, even though their families had lived there, again, for as long as memory. Brenner: “The Jews had been in Europe for millenniums, far longer than, say, the Magyars. No one would dream of referring to the Hungarians as Asiatics, yet, to [Martin] Buber [a German Zionist philosopher] the Jews of Europe were still Asians and presumably always would be.”

“The fact is undeniable that the Jews collectively are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives.”—Ben Frommer, a writer for the ultra-Right Zionist-Revisionists, 1935

This belief that the Jews could never really belong with the rest of Europeans came from a belief that Jews are not properly human, that they are fundamentally different from the Europeans they lived among. (They were wrong about this; Jews are definitely human.) This is true self-hatred; not the joking self-hatred of the Jewish comic, but true internalized self-loathing formed by generations of oppression in, specifically, Europe.

“We Jews, we the destroyers, will remain destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which is not your nature to build...those of us who fail to understand that truth will always be found in alliance with your rebellious factions, until disillusionment comes, the wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us.” —Maurice Samuel, a British-American Zionist in 1927 [emphasis in original]

Once it is said aloud, it is obvious that the Zionist project could be aligned with the Nazi project: both are premised on antisemitism, and have an investment in spreading antisemitism. It is impossible to be surprised at Nazis such as Baron von Mildenstein, who spent six months in Palestine before returning to become the head of the Jewish Department of the SS. It is impossible to be surprised at the many moments when leading Zionists reached out to Nazis to make common cause, to lend their support, and most of all to provide a convenient answer to the Jewish Question.

This “Jewish Question” was not a question at all for the majority of European Jews, who were termed by the Zionists to be “assimilationist” but actually just saw no reason not to continue to live where they already were, speaking Yiddish and taking care of their families.

“Germany already has too many Jews” — Chaim Weizmann, President of the WZO, in 1912

Zionists in Weimar Germany helped enable the rise of the Nazis by steadfastly refusing to fight the rise of antisemitism. Instead, the ZVfD was focused on fighting Communism. This provided a true boon to the Nazi propaganda machine, making the German Zionists enablers of Nazism, as Lenni Brenner explains, “is it difficult to understand the gullible reader of a Nazi newspaper, who concluded that what was said by the Nazis, and agreed to by the Zionists – Jews – had to be right? There would be worse: any Jewish movement that prattled on about the naturalness of anti-Semitism would, just as ‘naturally’, seek to come to terms with the Nazis when they came to power.”

And so they did, repeatedly collaborating with the Nazis including formally with the Ha’avara, essentially a free trade agreement between Jewish settlements in Palestine and the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the rising antisemitism in Germany drove a steady and increasing stream of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, furthering the settler-colonial toehold in the region well before the Holocaust gained momentum.

“If I were a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist.”—Adolf Eichmann

The uncomfortable fact is that the Holocaust was key in realizing the dreams of the Zionists. Does this not make the creation of Israel the final stage of the Holocaust?

“Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine.”—Emil Ludwig, 1936

We can feel compassion for the person who carried around such immense self-loathing cultivated by generations of violence and exclusion in Eastern and Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries up through the end of World War Two, before Jews became White after 1947 by becoming colonizers in their own right. But these generations of violence experienced in the North by pale-skinned Jews do not enter into the some moral equation with the Palestinian right to exist. Palestinians lived far away from these pogroms and smaller acts of communal violence that spawned Zionism. Had nothing to do with it. There were well-integrated, valued and respected Jewish communities in cities across the Levant; had been for as long as memory. (Please read When We Were Arabs by Massoud Hayoun). Their very existence was erased by the colonial Zionist project.

The Germans, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the French, the Italians all have a real historical debt because of their little fascist orgies beginning in the late 1930s.  Not so much the Russians, despite their 19th century pogroms—they paid the price to defeat Hitler.

And they call us anti-Semites for opposing Israel. Every accusation a confession.

We Jews are a diasporic people. The Jewish religion and tradition is built around a “necessary exile,” that has been torn from us by the Zionist project, another violence. Give Palestine back to the Palestinians.