Theodor Herzl: an Anti-Semite & Fascist
How Israel was the vanity project of a vicious ethnonationalist over-compensating for his feelings of inadequacy by targeting others.
The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, did not like Jews.
That might sound preposterous, given that Herzl dedicated much of his life to the creation of a “Jewish state”, but if you actually read his work, he’s pretty open about it.
Herzl was a bourgeois German
Herzl was born into an elitist class of Jews that emphasized their Sephardic origin (Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain), and claimed superiority over the “oriental” Ashkenazim Jews who hailed from Eastern Europe and beyond.
The bourgeois Germanic Jews were desperate to differentiate themselves from the “coarse and dirty, pillaging Tatars, who come to feed upon a country which does not belong to them” as Bernard Lazare in France described them in 1894. Of course, ‘feeding upon a country that does not belong to them’ is exactly what the bourgeois European Jews were all about, when they began their exodus to Palestine.
Side note: Lazare, ironically, would turn to Zionism later in life and he and Herzl would briefly…