Gerald Scarfe Cartoon - Zionists Use the Holocaust to Defend Racism

A Short Lesson in What is and Is Not Anti-Semitic

Jerusalem's Betar fans commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day with a demonstration against hiring Muslim i.e. Arab players

As you might be aware, the Zionists are having some difficult in deciding what is and is not anti-Semitic. The fourth cartoon down, by Gerald Scarfe, has been attacked by them as anti-Semitic because it shows Netanyahu with a dagger bathed in Palestinian blood.

This is apparently the medieval blood libel. Except I always thought that the blood libel was false, i.e. a libel. Since Netanyahu is a murderer with blood on his hands, then I can only assume that the Zionists are saying that the blood libel was also true. The truth apparently can also be anti-Semitic! But then Zionists have always traded on the oppression of Jews when they opposed doing anything at the time.

What is less known is that the Zionists, because they accepted the anti-Semitic belief that Jews did not belong in the non-Jewish states and amongst non-Jews, came to accept the same racial nonsense as the worst anti-Semites. Indeed, if you didn't know the person was a Zionist you'd assume they were a common and garden anti-Semite.

For example Pinhas Felix Rosenbluth, a leading German Zionist, who was to become Israel's first Minister of Justice wrote that Palestine is ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin.’

[Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism: Parallels and Influences (1883-1914), Joachim Doron, Studies in Zionism, No. 8 Autum 1981 citing “Feldbrief aus dem Osten’ Der judische Student (1914) p. 74.]

Arthur Ruppin, known as the father of land settlement in Palestine, after whom a major road in Tel Aviv is named, was a die-hard believer in the racial sciences as were many of Zionism’s founders. In the summer of 1933 Ruppin went on a pilgrimage to visit the ideological mentor of Himmler and a dedicated Nazi at Jena University, where Wilhelm Frick, the first National Socialist State Minister and then Nazi Minister of the Interior, who was hanged at Nuremburg in 1946 for war crimes, had had him installed.

‘Through Dr. Georg Landauer I traveled to Jena on August to meet Prof. Hans F.K. Günther, the founder of National-Socialist race theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Günther was most congenial but refused to accept credit for coining the Arian-concept, and agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior but different, and that the Jewish Question has to be solved justly.’

For more information about Ruppin see Arthur Ruppin’s Concept of Race, Israel Studies, Vol. 3. See also Tom Segev, The 7^thMillion, p. 19

When Ruppin, who was head of the Jewish Agency 1933-35, was accused of being anti-Semitic he retorted that ‘I have already established here that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’ [Diary 4.8.1893]. Ruppin even called for the execution of Dreyfuss, symbol of the fight against the reactionary and clerical anti-Semitism in France. Nor was Ruppin an isolated example. Theordor Herzl wrote that

In Paris..., I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism. Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Gollancz, London 1958 p.6.

To the Zionists it was 'futile' to try and combat anti-Semitism because racism, like the existence of separate races was 'natural', and what was natural was, in bourgeois logic, by definition unchangeable. The alternative would have been to analyse the social, political, economic and historical roots of anti-Semitism in order to combat it. But that would have called into question the very reason for Zionism's existence. Instead Zionism has, in Herzl's words, found it easier to come to terms with and pardon anti-Semitism. Pinsker, a Zionist who predated Herzl and the founder of Hovvei Zion (the Lovers of Zion),held that 'Judaephobia' was a psychic abnormality whose symptoms were anti-Semitism:

Judaephobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable. Pinsker, Autoemanzipation, ein Mahnrufan seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden Berlin 1882 p.5.

Chaim Weizzman, President of the World Zionist Organisation for so long and first President of Israel, confided to the late Richard Crossman MP, a member of the 1946 Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, and himself an ardent Zionist, that:

anti-Semitism is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him wherever he goes and however often he denies it. R H Crossman, A Nation Reborn, New York Atheneum 1960 p.2

Jacob Klatzkin, editor of the Zionist’s official newspaper Die Welt, and a co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, wrote:

We are in a. word naturally foreigners. We are an alien nation in your midst and we want to remain one. An unbridgeable chasm yawns between you and us. A loyal Jew can never be other than a Jewish patriot... We recognise a national unity of Diaspora Jews no matter in which land they may reside... no boundaries can restrain us in... pursuing our own Jewish policy. J Klatzkin, 'Krisis und Entscheidung in Judentum', Berlin 1921, p118 cited in Zionism & Racism p.204 Klaus Hermann, (Crisis ' Decision) see Menhuin pp.482/3

This is the context for Zionist allegations of 'anti-Semitism'. Below The Daily Beast OPEN ZION blog has a timely reminder of what is and what is not antisemitic and there is also a picture of those lovely Betar fans in Jerusalem, also celebrating Holocaust memorial day, albeit in a more traditional fashion - fresh from another anti-Arab pogrom, demonstrating against the hiring of Muslim players. The sign reads 'Betar - Purer than Ever.
Thanks to Gabriel Ash on Jews San Frontiere

Tony Greenstein