Before they took over Palestine, Zionists first had to colonize Judaism.
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
People sometimes say, ‘Every accusation is a confession.’ People project their own uncomfortable feelings on to others, or accuse their enemies of doing exactly what they themselves do, behavior sometimes called ‘Accusation in a Mirror.’
Remember that tendency when you hear Israel’s backers call their critics ‘antisemites’ or ‘self-hating Jews’. Occasionally, they may be right, but most often they’re projections about themselves. Looking at their history, Zionism’s founders despised the mostly-poor Jews of their time, the workers, scholars, artists, and peddlers, with their old fashioned clothing and beliefs. Leaders of Zionism like Theodore Herzl and Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky planned to remake the Jewish people into a nation of middle-class Europeans. They wanted to be among the colonizers, not the colonized.
In 21st century language, they wanted to be white.
In his book, From Herzl to Rabin, The Changing Image of Zionism historian Amnon Rubenstein quotes Jabotinsky: “Our starting point is to take the typical Yid [the widely-used derogatory term for the poor Jew] of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … The Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum. He is trodden upon and easily frightened and… despised by all …Therefore, the new Jew ought to charm all.”
Think about Jabotinsky’s rant when you hear anti-Zionist Jews accused of hating themselves. Who are the real self-haters here? Herzl wrote a whole booklet about Jewish deficiencies called Mauschel, which historian Jacques Kornberg called “an antisemite’s dream.”
So, Zionism was never about a safe homeland for the Jewish people, as it was advertised. It was about remaking the Jewish people into Europeans through the creation of a Jewish nation, which the Zionists would lead. Zionist leaders like Herzl and Chaim Weizmann modeled their imagined new state after the states they knew and admired. The UK, France, the USA, and Germany were and are the models which Israel follows.
Understand what is meant by antisemitism
The Zionist movement started in Europe in the mid-19th Century, at the same time “antisemitism” became a word and a movement. The word antisemitism was basically code for ‘Jew hatred,’ but the choice of term was not accidental. Race theory was becoming a ‘science’ at the time, and the antisemites were portraying Jews as part of a race of people called Semites, a group that included Arabs and some other East Mediterranean and North African minorities. Zionist Jews wanted out of that race.
Jabotinsky wrote that in their movement, “The new Jew had to be autonomous and rational, free of the “diseases” of the Diaspora…We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the Orient,’ thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that originate in the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing.”
That streak of racism has left the Arabs as the real victims of modern antisemitism. All that hatred of the Oriental, the poor, the non-white, falls on them, so they can be easily characterized as terrorists or barbarians or “human animals” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the Palestinians in October, 2023. Zionists arrived in Palestine already primed by antisemitism to hate and kill the indigenous people.
Zionist response to European antisemitism
The Zionists almost never fought against antisemitism. They thought it was a losing battle. Instead, they decided to collaborate with the Jew-haters on getting out of Europe to become colonizers in Asia. Leftist Jews who fought for equality, like the Jewish Bund, or Labor movement were much more popular than Zionists in Eastern European Jewish communities. Zionists didn’t help people deal with their oppression, only with trying to create their future state.
In their book The Radical Jewish Tradition, historians Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone document how Zionist organizations and theorists ignored, discouraged and undermined any fight against antisemitism in Europe and the US, “especially movements that united Jews and non-Jews.”
Initially, leaders such as Herzl sought assimilation into mainstream European society. When he was rejected, Herzl wrote: “We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain we are loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences or their wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens.”
Can you feel his pain there? Reacting to their rejection, people like Herzl set about trying to persuade the anti-Jewish rulers of imperial Europe to fund and support the foundation of a new state, preferably in historic Palestine, then a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. He solicited help from racist imperialists including Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, promising Rhodes that the new state would be “something colonial.”
The early Zionists were quite explicit about being a colonial project that would extend European influence into West Asia. Modern Zionists hate leftist slogans like “Zionism is colonialism” or “Zionism = racism”, but their founders and the imperialists of the time didn’t think those were bad things.
Colonialism and racism are wired into the foundations of Zionism. We can see this being acted out in Gaza and Lebanon now. The hundreds of thousands of victims there simply do not count. They’re regarded as subhuman, the way slave traders regarded Africans or European antisemites regarded Jews.
How Zionism colonized Judaism
People like Jabotinsky and Herzl basically told the existing Jewish communities, ‘Change into Zionists like us or get out of the way.’ Over and over, they blocked assistance and escape for persecuted Jews in Europe. They wanted their New Jews who would come to Palestine and fight for their new state. They didn’t want the ‘weak’ ones who tried to fit into the European societies that despised them.
The Zionist plan never appealed to the majority of Jews, but Zionists kept trying. They raised money for settlements in Palestine but not for rescuing Jews who wanted to go elsewhere. When liberals tried to pressure countries like the US to allow more Jewish immigration, the Zionists opposed it. Israel’s first president David Ben-Gurion is often quoted saying that saving half the Jews to Palestine was better than saving all of them to England.
Their new Jewish state did not exist and could never have existed without violent expulsion of whoever lived on the land first. So, creating their state required violating several principles of Jewish tradition, behaving in ways traditional Jews might consider immoral. But the new Jews were willing to abdicate those principles. Several terrorist gangs like Lehi (“the Stern gang”), Irgun (led by future Israeli PM Menachem Begin,) and Haganah. (which became part of the Israel Defense Force IDF,) began setting up in Palestine and attacking the British administrators and the people who lived there.
Well-known terror attacks include the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing about 91 hotel workers, British administrators and guests, and the slaughter of the village of Deir Yassin, in which over 100 Palestinians, mostly women and children were shot and/or burned to death.
There were many more such massacres, which terrorized 750,000 Palestinians into fleeing for their lives, thus allowing Israelis to move in. They weren’t “told by Arab governments to leave’, as Israel defenders like to say. The ‘New Jews’ of Irgun and Lehi drove them out.
Why this history is important
Looking at the history of Zionism, I see a group of brilliant and ambitious middle class Jews who internalized much of the anti-Jewish racism of their time. They came to idolize the European rulers who kept them down. I don’t blame the Zionists for internalizing antisemitic prejudices or for admiring their oppressors. Those are typical behaviors of oppressed people.
What I do blame them for is projecting their self-hatred and their admiration of the Europeans on to the others Semitic peoples, as they are doing now. It’s understandable to idolize the winners, but for the Zionists, this meant giving up most of what was valuable in Judaism and embracing the murderous racism and greed on which European colonialism was based. Their embrace of terrorism didn’t go away when Israel was founded. We can see it happening every day now on our screens and news reports.
A young Jewish boy at the 300,000 strong march in London, protesting about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, 05 October 2024 Photo by Aza Y. Alam
We have to admit that the Zionists succeeded on their own terms. You look at young Israelis on video and see a bunch of good-looking, healthy people toting guns and pushing everyone else around. They are popular in circles that used to hate them, including with right-wing leaders such as Hungary’s Victor Orban, who is known for his antisemitic attitudes.
But in the process, they have joined the oppressors and rejected the wisdom embodied by generations of Jewish communities and their most outstanding scholars.
Amnon Rubinstein wrote, “The new super-Jew represents everything that has traditionally been associated with the Gentiles, the goyim, the other side. In the post-Holocaust era, it is embarrassing to read Zionism’s founders’ disparaging evaluation of European Jewry. Their poverty is reviled, their helplessness despised, their virtues ignored.”
We can see that in Israel, Jewish identity has been colonized, transmogrified into a killing machine.
The Zionist Jew is tougher and richer, oppressing instead of being oppressed. Who wouldn’t want to be on the side that’s winning? But in 2024, we can see where this attitude leads.
Zionists have become monsters, proxies committing the worst crimes of the US Empire. Motivated by their people’s histories of pogroms and discrimination, and their own lust for power, they have become the new antisemites. Forsaking the essence of Judaism, they are creating a Holocaust in Palestine. Instead of producing Einsteins and Spinozas, they are producing Netanyahus and Gallants, a gang of corrupt killers.
Jewish identity has been colonized, transmogrified into a killing machine.
The Jewish community is now divided between Zionists vs. anti-Zionists. The world is splitting also — the US, UK, Germany, and Israel against almost everybody else. We are all being dragged into war. This sad story cannot end well, but it needs to end soon.
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