“It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobidor. I fear – God forbid – that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Dheisheh, Betein or El Khalil.” -Daniel Boyarin-
Antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews. To this definition, the Southern Poverty Law Centre adds that antisemitism seeks to racialize the Jewish people, to ascribe certain characteristics to it as a whole. Zionism is a nationalist political ideology in favour of the creation of a Jewish state, Israel. It is now in support of that state’s continued existence.
An important aspect of Zionism is that the United Nations and many other organisations consider Israel to be engaged in settler colonialism, the practice of “carving out” a new homeland in a previously inhabited land, thereby creating what genocide scholar Patrick Wolfe calls: “a logic of elimination”. What he means by this is the need to develop a moral and practical justification for the removal of the native population, paving the way for “ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other tools of ethnocide.” Criticism of Israel and Zionism in general is thus not antisemitic whatsoever, disavowing the actions of a state does not take aim at an entire religious group, and it would certainly be antisemitic to conflate the two.
The origins of Zionism
The vision of a Jewish state in Palestine predates the 20th and even the 19th century. Indeed, in 1799, during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed Palestine as an independent Jewish state. While this project never came into fruition as Napoleon was defeated and returned to France, it was the first time Palestine was proposed to be a Jewish homeland. After this, around a century passed before the first Zionist Congress was held. As part of it, the first Zionist organisation was founded, with the objective of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1917, as an Ottoman defeat in World War I seemed inevitable, and the Middle East had been secretly partitioned between France and the United Kingdom, then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the now infamous “Balfour Declaration”, promising British support to the Zionist endeavour. Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922 was also a strong supporter of the Zionist cause, and a friend to both Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, and Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel. Another fervent Zionist was Winston Churchill, in whose view, Zionism provided Jews “a national idea of a commanding character”.
An apparent paradox, both Arthur Balfour and Churchill were staunch antisemites. In 1905 when he was Prime Minister, Balfour called for the rejection of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire, claiming Jewish immigration to bring “undoubted evils”. Churchill’s antisemitism was even more pronounced, as he claimed Jews to engage in a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation” in 1920. Furthermore, it was Churchill, not the Nazis who started the antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, claiming communism to be a global Jewish plot to take over the world. Lloyd George was not so explicitly antisemitic, nevertheless he was the first of many who saw Jews as an instrument to be used to further Western interests, more on this later.
This apparent contradiction begs the question of why these fundamentally antisemitic politicians would support a Jewish state in Palestine. For Balfour, the Zionist project was a convenient answer to the “Jewish Question”, the debate in the ostensibly liberal countries of Europe dealing with the status of Jews as a minority within society. Youssef Munayyer phrases it nicely: “instead of insisting that societies accept all citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation.” For Churchill, the “international Jew” was plotting to overthrow the West in line with his “Judeo-Bolshevist” conspiracy theory, and Israel would, as beforementioned, provide a national idea, which would in his opinion stop him from trying to overthrow civilisation. Lloyd George took a more pragmatic approach, avoiding the blatant antisemitism of Balfour and Churchill. In his 1939 memoir, he talks about the “war value of the Jews of the dispersal”, referring to the German mobilisation of Jews in Poland against the Russian empire during World War I. George goes on to explain that it was this “war value of the Jews” which led him to develop an interest in Weizmann. His statement is reminiscent of Joe Biden, who proclaimed in 1986 that “were there not an Israel, the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”.
We thus observe three of the most instrumental people to the Zionist effort to be motivated not by a noble effort to provide a safe haven for Jews, but by a will to rid England of Jewish people, by a strange vision of the Jew as harbinger of destruction and chaos (and a consequent need to get rid of him), and by an impetus to use Jewish people, in this case as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. In its initial phase, Zionism was opposed by both liberal and orthodox Jewish organisations in Europe, who feared that “Jewish nationalism might endanger integration into non-Jewish society and give new momentum to anti-Semitism”. Karl Kraus, a renowned Austrian Jewish journalist and writer, said in 1898: “The militant Zionists in particular succeeded in convincing Christians who had previously had no taste for anti-semitism of the sanctity of the idea of separation”.
Israel, land of the (white) Jews
According to the Israeli Basic Law passed in 2018, “The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination”. The United Nations say that self-determination must involve “the rights of all peoples to pursue freely their economic, social and cultural development without outside interference”. These statements are hard to reconcile with the current status quo in Israel. There exists not only apartheid between Arabs and non-Arabs, but also a de facto racial hierarchy within the non-Arab, Jewish population of Israel.
The most flagrant example of this are the “Beta Israel”, Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel from Ethiopia after the massive operations “Moses” and “Solomon”. Around 160’000 of them live in Israel, the biggest population in the world. Hanan Chehata writes about the hatred they face in their daily lives: they are massively discriminated against in nearly all aspects of life, such as housing, employment, education, the army, and even in the practice of their religion. According to a study, 53 percent of employers preferred not to employ “Falashas” (a derogatory term for Ethiopian Jews), and 70 percent of them tended not to promote them. Out of 4’500 Ethiopians who graduate with degrees, only around 15 percent find work in their field of study. Additionally, some areas have policies of not selling housing to non-white Jewish people. “Anyone can come, but not Ethiopians”, says the owner of a building in Ashkelon. There have also been multiple instances of the country’s chief Rabbis calling black people the N-word and monkeys (imagine the pope screaming the N-word from his Vatican balcony), Benjamin Netanyahu also referred to black African immigrants as “much worse” than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”. White Israelis have murdered black refugees and even babies, without facing imprisonment. Finally, in a fashion typical for colonialism all over the world (Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc.), Israel forcibly sterilised Ethiopian Jewish women, a policy generally aimed at keeping specific communities from growing.
This certainly is not the only instance of Israel harming Jewish people of colour. In the 1950s, up to 5,000 Yemenite Jewish babies disappeared from their hospital beds, their mothers were told they had died, or were not informed at all, according to the lowest estimates, one in eight Yemeni Jewish babies in Israel disappeared. Soon after it was alleged that the babies were kidnapped by the Israeli state and put up for adoption or just sold to childless European Jews. Israel always denied any involvement in this matter, until 2016, when cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi, the senior official in charge of reviewing archival material on the matter, admitted that Yemenite babies were indeed taken from their families. In 2021, a report from the Israeli health ministry detailed its involvement in the disappearance, admitting it had helped put the babies up for adoption. Since then, the ministry has tried to prevent the public release of its report. A Knesset Committee has also admitted that medical experiments have been performed on Yemenite children, some of whom died of their consequences. In some cases, their hearts were harvested and given to American doctors who were doing research on heart disease in Yemen.
Another example of many, is the way Iraqi Jews came to Israel. Around 110,000 Jews moved from Iraq to Israel shortly after its creation, motivated by antisemitic attacks in their home countries and a promise of a better life in the new Jewish state. According to prominent Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, carried out several attacks against Jews in Iraq, involving bombings among other things. Thus, Israel played a major part in destroying the millennia-old Jewish communities of middle eastern countries such as Iraq.
So, we can certainly say that Israel is not a country for all Jews, rather it is a place for white, European Jews. Who better to exemplify this than one of the most influent white European Jewish intellectuals of the last century, Hannah Arendt. A Jerusalem Post article details Arendt’s visit to Israel: “Describing Israel, Arendt noted that the country had at its top German judges of whom she approved as the “best of German Jewry.” Below them were prosecuting attorneys, one of whom, a Galician Jew, was “still European,” she noted. “Everything is organized by the Israeli police force which gives me the creeps. It speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutes among them. They obey any order. Outside the courthouse doors the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.” Israel as a colonial entity cannot and does not want to rid itself of white supremacy, people of colour will never be safe there, even if they are Jewish.
They may be antisemitic, but at least they are with us…
A third and equally relevant part of Zionist antisemitism is the movement’s alliance and cooperation with far right and antisemitic organisations ever since the movement’s inception. Even before Israel gained independence, it worked together with none other than Nazi Germany. The Haavara Agreement was a treaty between the Zionist movement in Palestine and the NSDAP, facilitating the migration of German Jews from Germany to Palestine. This was financed by the sale of the property of German Jews, the proceeds of which paid for essential (German-produced) goods. At this time, Nazi Germany was being boycotted by Jewish organisations, businesses, and other groups all over the world, posing a potential threat to the still fragile fascist state, yet the Zionists ignored this boycott and cooperated with it regardless, boosting the German economy.
In the present day, Israeli Zionists have again found strange bedfellows. Their partners and allies include leaders such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Mateusz Morawiecki. Former Italian interior minister Salvini is very straightforward about his affinity for CasaPound, a neo-fascist political organisation, whose members he has openly worked with. Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has publicly called Miklós Horthy, the country’s World War II leader, a “great statesman”. The Horthy government was a member of the Axis Powers and enacted antisemitic legislature leading to the deportation of around 440,000 Jews.
Morawiecki, the Polish Prime Minister actively tried to illegalise the claim that Polish people and officials collaborated in the Holocaust, a form of Holocaust revisionism: “Those who say that Poland may be responsible for the crimes of World War II deserve jail terms”. These are only a few examples of the dubious relations Israel maintains with antisemites around the world, there are too many instances to list here. This reaching out has not come without consequences. The American far-right has picked up on the amicable tone set forth by Israel and capitalises on it. Prominent American neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed “White Nationalist” Richard Spencer has called himself a “White Zionist” and has given Israel as an example of an “ethnostate” he would like to see implemented in the USA. Stephen Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under Donald Trump, who ran the far-right media-outlet Breitbart News, known for its white supremacist and conspiratorial positions and who complained about Jews in his daughter’s school, and Sebastian Gorka, a media host on the far right network Newsmax and a former Trump White House official, who is a proud supporter of the Vitézi Rend, a fascist Hungarian organisation, both consider themselves proud Zionists.
Instead of using their considerable power to act against threats on Jewish lives all over the world, Israel actively endangers them, by working with and promoting, far-right, fascist, and ethnonationalist forces. It would seem that promoting nationalism and short-term political gain is more important to Israel than to protect Jewish lives around the world.
Conclusion
The notion that Israel is a safe haven for all Jews can safely be discarded after considering all the above. While it would be absurd to claim Israel to be antisemitic in the way Nazi Germany was antisemitic, it nevertheless cannot be denied that Zionism has deeply antisemitic roots, and only ever gained the indispensable support of European powers because they saw Zionism as a way to eject their Jewish populations. Furthermore, there is no doubt that systems exist within the country that exclude and discriminate against a large number of Jews, and the Israeli state openly and proudly works together with antisemites (who are not so unlike Nazi Germany) internationally. A more logical and historically consistent perspective would be that Israel is a settler colony following a long European tradition. As such it is necessarily obsessed with creating a settler in-group, most often a racial one. In Israel’s case that is not white people, as was the case in Canada, Australia, etc., but the Jewish people. Not all Jewish people though, as we have seen. Just as South Africa had the Population Registration Act, Israel has the Law of Return. In both cases, “racial experts” decided who got to be part of the in-group, i.e. who got to be White, or Jewish. In Israel it is the orthodox Rabbis (yes, the notoriously racist ones), who decide singlehandedly who gets to be Jewish and who does not. Thus, Jewishness is cynically used to police Israeli society, the aforementioned Ethiopian Jews for example are sometimes outright refused to be Jewish.
This issue is now more relevant as ever, as dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is growing in the Jewish Diaspora all around the world, and Israeli media is calling for their exclusion from the Jewish community at large. A state committing the worst crimes possible cannot possibly claim to represent a large and heterogenous group of people without generalising them, ascribing certain characteristics to them as a whole and therefore racializing them. This, next to the obvious hatred brought against non-white Jews, is what makes Israel and Zionism antisemitic.
Read more: Zionism is antisemitismBy Lino BATTIN
Le Dragon Déchaîné 