The Jewish victims of Zionism
18 August 2024
By the end of 1944, the top Nazi leaders had begun to realise that Germany had lost the war. Some, therefore, wished to flee from Germany, and for their purposes wished to have enormous sums of money. They offered Rabbi Weissmandel, the spiritual head of Hungarian Jews, to spare the lives of tens of thousands of these Jews in return for a ransom of twenty five million dollars. The Zionist agency had these millions of dollars readily available, but the political Zionist representative Sol Meyer, then in Switzerland, refused to pay. As he saw it, the greater the number of Jews who went into Hitler’s gas-chambers and furnaces, the greater would be the chance of acquiring a land of their own after the war. I quote his words verbatim:
You must constantly bear in mind and constantly have before your eyes the fact that the most important matter is that we acquire a state after the end of the war. And if we do not have sufficient victims we shall have no right to demand an independent state…It is therefore,… insolent shamelessness to ask for… monies from the enemy to succour our blood, for only by blood shall we obtain a land.
And so these tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews met their death in the gas-chambers and crematoria. Nor did this inhumanity end here. Zionism reached its nadir — the very depths of depravity — in the reply by Dr. Isaac Greenbaum, a Zionist leader, to the appeal to the Zionist agency for funds to rescue Jews from Poland. Again, I quote verbatim:
One cow in Palestine is more important than all of the Jews in Poland.
These shocking details were common knowledge among the first generation of Israelis, as I. M. Rabinowitch admitted in his article “Political Zionists and the state of Israel,” which appeared in the Jewish Guardian, in April 1974 (issue no. 1, p. 11). Rabinowitch comments, acerbically:
One may well ask here: Who were the worst murderers — Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann, not Jews but rabid anti-Semites, or these Zionists, to whom a land was more important that the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, and to whom one cow in Palestine was more important than all of the Jews in Poland? As I have a number of times had the occasion to observe, as far as these Zionist agency representatives were concerned, the mistake Hitler and Eichmann had made was that they did not select. Political Zionists violently resent equating political Zionism with Nazism; but by what morality was it possible to cold-bloodedly abandon elderly, and physically disabled Jews?
The unholy alliance between Zionists and Nazis was not new, of course. In April 1933 the journalist and SS-member Leopold von Mildenstein travelled to Palestine with his friend Kurt Tuchler, a Zionist living in Berlin, and their wives. Tuchler wanted to show the Nazis that the emigration of German Jews’ to Palestinethe would be a perfect solution to the so-called “Jewish question.” Once in Palestine, von Mildenstein met David Ben Gurion and was full of admiration for the Jewish activities there. Back in Germany von Mildenstein wrote some articles in the Nazi journal Angriff in an attempt to persuade the German authorities to embrace the emigration idea, but he ultimately failed. The rare medal above commemorates von Mildenberg’s action, which is little known today. Tragically, von Mildenstein went on to recruit Adolf Eichmann to the government department set up to deal with “the Jewish question.” Von Mildenstein himself had to leave this department after a dispute with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the organisers of the Shoah.
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The tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who perished in the death camps thanks to Zionist policy are far from being the only Jewish victims of Zionism. The Sephardi Jews, who now form the majority of the Jewish population in Israel, have also suffered greatly. Zionism claims to be a liberation movement for all Jews, but its primary concern has in fact always been the fate of European Jews — or more precisely for that tiny minority of European Jews who actually settled in Israel and their descendants.
As Israeli-American professor Ella Shohat has shown, Zionism has always discriminated in the way it deploys its energies and resources in Israel, to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent detriment of Oriental Jews. Even though Ashkenazi Jews account for less than thirty per cent of the population, they constitute a kind of “First-World elite” which dominates not only the Palestinians but also the Oriental Jews. The Sephardim are treated as a kind of “Jewish Third-World people,” a semi-colonised nation-within-a-nation. According to Shohat:
The rich culture of Jews from Arab and Moslem countries is scarcely studied in Israeli schools and academic institutions. While Yiddish is prized and officially subsidized, Ladino and other Sephardi dialects are neglected. — “Those who do not speak Yiddish,” Golda Meir once said, “are not Jews” — Yiddish, through an ironic turn of history, became for Sephardim the language of the oppressor, a coded speech linked to privilege.
This discrimination even extends to the IDF, once touted as “the great leveller” of Israeli society. The Golani Brigade, which is perceived as Oriental or “Mizrahi” is regularly deployed to the front line, the while the Paratroopers Brigade, which is perceived as Ashkenazi, has a consistently lower casualty rate. Mizrahi Jews are sent to police and fight against Palestinians in the occupied territories, while middle and upper-class Ashkenazi Israelis tend to serve in special units. As with educational opportunities, in the army, Mizrahim are sent to the periphery to serve as the black labor at the bottom of the hierarchy. This has only intensified with the organized blitz by the national-religious community on high-ranking positions in the army.
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Last but not least, Zionism victimises Jews who do not live in Israel — which is to say, the vast majority of Jews in the world. The denigration of Jewish life outside of Israel has long been a feature of Zionist thought and practice. The mobilisation of the diaspora to justify whatever political or military action Israel might undertake constitutes its crucial element. Innocent though it may appear, the automatic identification of the state of Israel both with Jews and with Judaism suggests that ethnic nationalism can better protect civilian populations than modern, pluralist liberal societies. It comes as no surprise, then, that an increasing number of Zionists in Europe and North America, despite their former espousal of left-wing values, support right-wing parties that admire Israel as a model of proud and combative ethnic nationalism.
Unconditional support for Israel has given rise, on both sides, to a level of verbal violence that contrasts with the manners and customs of liberal democracies. Anti-Zionist activity of whatever kind is denounced as antisemitism, a tactic that serves to further consolidate identification of Judaism and Jews with Zionism. At the same time, many young Jews in the United States find pluralist society closer to their Jewish principles than any “Jewish ethnocracy.” As the American writer, professor, and rabbi, Jay Michaelson put it:
If all Judaism means is looking out for the Jews, many young people are right to have no interest in it. A Judaism that just preserves the Jews stands for nothing.
Several signs of the growing awareness of the danger Zionism represents for Jewish continuity can be detected. The Tikkun Community, a movement launched by Rabbi Michael Lerner based on the periodical Tikkun, has echoed these very concerns and spoken out against the effort to reduce Jewish life in the United States to support for Israel. Rabbi Lerner has on several occasions been attacked and received death threats because of his activities.
Henry Siegman, a veteran of Jewish organisations who has taken a critical distance from his institutional past, has argued that Zionism has turned the ideology of the Jewish state into ‘’a surrogate religion.’’ Support for Israel, he says, now fills a spiritual vacuum in secular Jews, to the point that criticism of Israel is seen as a betrayal of their very Jewish identity, in a kind of “Jewish community McCarthyism”:
If you do not support the government of Israel then your Jewishness, not your political judgment, is in question.
In a 2002 article for the Michigan Quarterly Review, Alisa Solomon, an American Jewish author, also worried that the Zionist establishment might succeed in imposing its will and “excommunicate” any Jew who might not unconditionally support the Zionist state:
If that is so — if, after all these millennia, the Conference of Presidents really gets away with instituting a kind of Jewish excommunication over its rapturous rallying behind Sharon [the then Israeli prime minister] — then Zionism will forever distort, and even threaten to destroy, the creativity, the diversity, the genius of American Jewishness. Zionism, God forbid, will turn out to be the greatest peril Jewish America has ever faced.
God forbid, indeed.
Read the next articles in this series: The Israeli origins of Nazi porn and The true history of the Jews.