An Unkosher State part 2: Antisemitic pro-Zionists
A Dark Alliance: How antisemites and Zionists forged an alliance to solve "the Jewish question"
(Part 1 of the series is here)
The roots of antisemitism
The idea of a Jewish state was first proposed by Theodore Herzl in his manifesto Der Judenstaat, in response to the brutal antisemitism he saw around him. Herzl blames Jews themselves for antisemitism, specifically the “unspeakably low and repugnant” Mauschel Jews. The solution he proposes is that the Jews should leave - the same conclusion the Nazis would come to the following century.
Herzl’s progressive vision didn’t serve Hans, the son whom he refused to circumcise. Hans felt that “religion is essential to me” but he struggled for the entirety of his short and tragic life over which one to follow. Neither the circumcision he subjected himself to later in life nor his Baptism relieved his crushing depression, and he took his own life in 1924, just days after his sister Pauline’s death from drug abuse. His final diary entry notes that “my life was badly lived, and it is taking a bad end.” Perhaps the same will be said of der Judenstaat.
Anti-Jewish sentiment is ancient. It was a political matter for the Romans because the Judeans refused to bow to Caesar and accept imperial law, but in the Christian world it became a religious injunction. Popes throughout the middle ages ordered that the Talmud be burned and forced Christ-killers into ghettoes. Hating Jews was an act of devotion for many Christians, but things were changing in Rabbi Diskin’s time. In 1879, Wilhelm Marr coined the term antisemitism (Antisemitismus in German) when he founded the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga) to support Germans in the struggle against the supposedly degenerate Jewish race. In doing so, he was updating this ancient prejudice from religious superstition to “scientific” social Darwinism, and championing it as a public good (while overlooking the fact that there are Jews with thousand-year lineages of every shade from black Ethiopians to Arab Yemenis, Kaifeng Chinese, Bene Israel Indians and white Eastern Europeans). Though the Antisemiten-Liga dissolved within a few years, Marr’s terminology (and its implicit racial theory) is repeated all over the world, often by Jews or politicians claiming to care about them.
Whatever the reasoning, prejudice was a brutal reality for European Jews who were generally forbidden from owning land until the early 20th century and lived under threat of expulsions and murderous pogroms. My grandmother grew up being beaten up and spat at on the way to school, well before the Nazis arrived in Hungary, and in Herzl’s time incidents like the French League of Antisemites crashing a Jewish wedding and flinging around acid were common. Being commonplace does not make it any less awful, but note that Rabbi Diskin did not consider antisemitism a threat. Purges, prohibitions and injustice abounded, along with conspiracy theories about Jews poisoning wells, spreading Black Death, eating the blood of Christian babies and so on - none of this harmed Jewish culture, which outlived all of its oppressors from Babylon to Rome to the Third Reich. For Rabbi Joshua Diskin, the threat to the Jewish people came from Zionists.
In contrast to Europe, Jews lived in Palestine relatively unmolested most of the time, in harmony with the Indigenous populations. Small Jewish communities existed there continuously for three millennia, trading and working together with the Indigenous Palestinian population of Muslims and Christians, and sometimes worshipping together too. The early non-secular settlers also fared well, on the whole, working together with their Arab neighbours in agriculture and attending each other’s schools and hospitals.
“Muslim women cooperated respectfully with the customs of the Jewish religion… the Muslim neighbours allowed the Jewish women to pump water necessary before the Sabbath.”
- A Jewish memoirist reports on early interactions between Jewish settlers and Arabs in Palestine.
Where clashes did happen it was in settlements like Gederah, founded by the radical Bilu movement. They were nationalists who, according to one of their members, humiliated local Arabs and made no attempt to integrate or understand their customs. They also attacked Arab villagers grazing animals on the land they had used for centuries. Part of the strategy of Bilu was to adopt Hebrew as vernacular, which proved highly divisive. Rabbi Diskin was horrified by this development, and threw a man out of his house for addressing him in the language that had long been reserved for prayer. As Moroccan-Israeli author Sara Shilo put it: “Along came the knife of Hebrew and cut us in two.”
“the Zionist idea... was a colonial idea” - Theodor Herzl
Even when tensions were rising, non-political Zionists and major Arab leaders called for unity. Raghib al-Nashashibi, for example, who served as mayor of Jerusalem into the 1930s, insisted that both Jews and Arabs should be considered Palestinians. Though he was a devout Muslim, his first wife was Christian and his second was Jewish. Mizrahi (Arab) Jews generally supported Palestinians against the incoming political Zionists. In the 1950s, they were publishing joint magazines with Palestinians and organising street protests together, and in the 1970s many joined the Israeli Black Panther movement to fight what they saw as colonialism. In this they were in agreement with Herzl, for whom “the Zionist idea... was a colonial idea”.
The hatred Herzl endured in spite of his concerted attempts to assimilate was surely painful, and being on the sharp end of bigotry can twist a person in terrible ways. For him, antisemitism became a political tool. When he wrote, “the antisemites will become our most dependable friends”, he was correct. Israel’s greatest friend in the British government was Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister and Jew-hater Arthur Balfour, who sponsored legislation in 1905 preventing Jews fleeing pogroms from entering England. He was the architect of the Balfour Declaration promising Palestine to the Zionists in 1917. Along with Herzl, his is the only other name recorded in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
Many other openly antisemitic politicians were pro-Zionist, including Mussolini, Stalin and Churchill. Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideologue of the Nazi party, wrote that: “Zionism must be vigorously supported”, and Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring were vocal in doing so. Leopold von Mildenstein visited Zionist settlements in Palestine in 1933 with a delegation of other SS officers and Zionist Jews; his trip is documented in a 12-part series called “A Nazi visits Palestine” (Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina) in the press, and was commemorated with a specially-issued medal. Adolf Eichmann, who managed the logistics of the death camps, followed his footsteps to Palestine in 1937.
Agendas aligned
In 1932, Zionists were an insignificant and unpopular minority; the United Israel Appeal fundraising report lamented that “we have to reckon not only with the indifference of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hostility.” Their political power began to grow significantly only after Hitler took power in 1933; both movements shared the goal of solving “the Jewish question” by ridding Germany of its Jews, and they worked together for that purpose. That year, the German branch of the World Zionist Organisation made the Ha’avara agreement with the Nazis. Until then, emigrating Jews were not able to take their wealth with them; the agreement allowed Jews to transfer assets to Palestine, and over 50,000 did. The Zionist Federation of Germany was also the only party still allowed to publish a newspaper after Kristallnacht in 1938. Perhaps it was political expediency, but I wonder how they could look into the faces of evildoers for long enough to broker these deals.
The World Zionist Organisation also lobbied both the UK and the US governments to put quotas on the number of Jews allowed in, making emigration to Palestine the only escape for many people facing the camps. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, leader of the World Zionist Movement and later First Immigration Minister of Israel, opposed Jews sending relief packages to Jews in occupied Europe, partly because intensifying their misery advanced his political goals and partly because he didn’t want them wasting their money. His response to the United Jewish Appeal raising funds to rescue Jews was vehement:
“‘NO!’ and I say again, ‘NO!’ Not one cow here for ten thousand Jews in Germany. One should bravely resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance.”
As Zionist official Eliezer Livneh put it in 1966, “for the Zionist leadership the rescue of Jews was not an aim in itself, but only a means [for settling Palestine.]”
While rhetoric about antisemitism was politically useful, the reality was that it may have been at its lowest point in history just before Israel was founded. Few celebrated the Holocaust when horror of the camps was exposed. The master-race was hubristic nonsense, the Thousand Year Reich had lasted just over a decade, and sharing views with the Nazis just wasn’t cool. Pope Pius XII’s 1943 Encyclical overturned centuries of Catholic theology by declaring that modern Jews were not responsible for murdering Christ, the 50s saw anti-Semitic lines removed from Christian worship, and in the 60s the charge of deicide was formally dropped by the Catholics, the Episcopal Church and others. Of course, antisemitism would not disappear overnight, but a huge majority of Catholic bishops voted to promote “a fraternal dialogue, of Biblical and theological studies, to favor the mutual understanding and esteem between Jews and Christians.”
Israeli Major General Matityahu Peled understood the cynical nature of the game, noting that “the thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff.” Abba Eban, first Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN commented regarding his duties that “one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the world is to prove that the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all”. During the 1982 war with Lebanon, journalists reporting the massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps were accused of antisemitism, some of whom were Jewish themselves. The charge has also been levelled at Jewish Voice for Peace by the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, who also called people advocating for equal rights for Palestinians “extremists”, and stated that anti-Zionists are guilty of a “wilful denial of even a superficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people”.
Jewish history would suggest otherwise. Most rabbis were implacably opposed to nationalism (like Rabbi Diskin), because it is an article of the faith that the redemption of the Jews comes only via divine intervention. Some rabbis, like Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who took a tolerant stance towards some strands of Zionism in a tumultuous time, argued that creating Jewish agricultural colonies would arouse divine mercy and lead to the establishment of the Jewish state by the Messiah. But no rabbi was so bold as to overrule the Talmud in favour of nationalism, and no psak supporting the state of Israel was issued until after the state was established.
“Furtive and cunning”
The only British politician with sympathies for Palestinians who came close to power in recent years was Jeremy Corbyn, and the smear of antisemitism was deployed to devastating effect. As soon as he took control of the Labour party, there were almost daily attacks from both left and right in the media. Party members were suspended on grounds of antisemitism for criticising Israeli aggression against Palestinians.
Around this time the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published a new definition of antisemitism, where “anti-Zionism can be a form of antisemitism when it... seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel”; this makes the Maharil Diskin himself an antisemite. Drawing comparisons between Israeli and Nazi policy is also antisemitic, according to the new definition, so Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai also falls foul with his 2008 promise to visit “a Shoah [Holocaust]” on Gaza (he said this before violating international law and using white phosphorous in a civilian area). Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a leading Zionist thinker, explicitly drew another comparison with Nazi ideology during the Third Reich, when outlining his plan to oust the Palestinians; regarding ethnic cleansing, he said that “Hitler — odious as he is to us — has given this idea a good name in the world.”
The IHRA’s Orwellian word game, therefore, defines both the most zealous rabbis of history and the secular founders of Zionism as antisemites, and yet it was adopted by governments including the US, the UK and Germany; this effectively makes it impossible for politicians to criticise Israel without fearing reprisals. None of this does anything to reduce antisemitism or protect Jews. It just confuses an issue which is already extremely confusing. For example, regarding comments made about “ugly little Jews and Jewesses”, and their “audacious and unfortunate faces, furtive and cunning eyes”, or their “miserable stunted jargons”: is this antisemitic? What about writings describing how “the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum... trodden upon and easily frightened”. Are these sentiments antisemitic? Gentiles uttering such insults would surely be called antisemites, and potentially be charged with hate speech, but the first was Herzl and the second was Jabotinsky - two of the most important Jewish Zionists in history.
Perhaps, like many of the progressives of their time, these early Zionists simply felt that primitive people were an obstacle to progress, whether Jews or Palestinians. Jabotinsky commented that the Arabs were “five hundred years behind us”, and Herzl felt that Jews in Palestine would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.” This progressive agenda would be served by dispossessing the Arabs of their land; “spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
A psychoanalyst might surmise that the “furtive and cunning eyes” of the people in a local synagogue were simply Herzl’s projection - the unintegrated shadow of a man who spent most of his life denying and unsuccessfully hiding who he was. I’ve spoken to analysts who see Zionism as a trauma response to the Holocaust making the victim turn perpetrator. The Maharil Diskin might not have been so sympathetic - after all, a moral code is designed precisely to limit the damage we do when we are angry, hurt or otherwise off-balance. Perhaps he would have commented that the mitzvot themselves are the means of healing from trauma. As the Talmud puts it, Jews observe the mitzvot in order to “repair the world” (tikkun olam). Breaking the code might be an error, a failing or a lapse of religious conviction. But it was certainly never conceived of as a virtue until Zionists sought to harmonise their ancient religion with the atheistic ethnonationalism of Herzl.
Any Jew with the courage to voice reservations about Zionism will likely have been called a “self-hating Jew” by their community, perhaps by their family too. Perhaps the charge would be better reserved for the architects of Zionism itself, both for their rhetoric and the disastrous impacts of their politics on Jewish people during the Nazi period and ever since.
Part 3 - Jewish Neurodiversity: Conformity and the collapse of a covenant