On May 22, 3:00 pm, "Bill Reid" happyhealthy.net> wrote:

The ideological pathologies that are both Zionism and Nazism have
similar historical origins - in German Romanticism - which should be
obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of 19th century
German, and European, history. Contrary to the ludicrous myth peddled
by Zionists, Zionism was not a response to the Nazi holocaust, but a
racist colonial project conceived well before (in the 19th century)
the judeocide of the Nazis.

Antisemitism as a form of racism emerged in colonial ideology within a
system of classifications in which both Arabs and Jews were designated
'Semite', a supposedly inferior 'race' to the 'Aryan' whose precocious
civilizations were being 'unearthed' in India. This is why Benjamin
Disraeli considered the Arabs "Jews on horseback". Now, this has
consequences. If anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism (in its
contemporary sense as anti-Jewish racism) are historically joined at
the hip, then this compels us to see them as not merely equivalent
(which is obvious, yet implicitly denied by those ignorant of
history), but as part of the same historical sickness, part of the
same system of Othering and dehumanisation.

Zionism was imbricated with British colonialism in Palestine, and with
the vicious repression of the Palestinian national movement. Had it
not been for WWII, the Zionist war of conquest would have been fought
and probably won anyway. The fact that many Jewish people turned to
Zionism after the Nazi holocaust is one of the real tragedies of
history, because in practise it was nothing other than the racist
murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. To justify that is
shameful, and to justify it with reference to the Nazi holocaust is
perverse (ie playing "the Holocaust card"). There has been no greater
crime in human history. Does that make the case for a racist, Zionist
Israel? Does genocide make the case for ethnic cleansing and mass
murder? Only in the mind of someone who has wholly swallowed the
racialising pathology and propaganda of Zionism. But of course, I
should mention Israeli antisemitism isn't just aimed at Arabs. It
isn't even just aimed at Sephardic Jews either. Zionism replicates
almost exactly the
discourse of classical European antisemitism, with its ideological and
etymological origins in Aryan racial discourse . And any defense of
Zionism is by logical corollary an antisemitic gesture.

Jewish people are not some homogenous bloc (and most of them are
increasingly anti-Zionist), or some grouping that could possibly have
a collective 'will' and interest represented in a national state. In
general, I think such an idea is an essentialist, delirial absurdity
that should be left to antisemites and Zionists, who are ideological
co-dependents these days.

On colonialism, blood and soil:

The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed
the 'historical right'. ([Anita] Shapira also
refers to it as the 'proprietary right') of the Jews to Palestine. It
was a "right that required no proof ... a
fundamental component of all Zionist programmes". Steeped in German
Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish
people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only -
and only Jews
could - establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil
there. Noting the 'German source', Shapira points
to the 'recurrent motif' in Zionism of the 'mysticism that links blood
and soil', the "cult of heroes, death and
graves", the belief that "graves are the source of the vital link with
the land, and they generate the loyalty of
man to that soil", and that "blood fructifies the soil (in an almost
literal sense)", and so on. Even so sober a
thinker as Ahad Ha'am could aver that Palestine was "a land to which
our historical right is beyond doubt and has
no need for far-fetched proofs". The veteran Zionist leader, Mennahem
Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument
to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that "the Arabs
recognise unconditionally the historic title of the Jews to the land".

This sort of 'historic right' was also siezed by the Romantic
precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the
Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was
said to have legitimate claims on Slavic
territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already
inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", "fertilised by the most
noble ancient German blood", "germanic for many centuries and long
before a Slav
set foot there", "teutonic-German Volksbloden for 3,000 years as far
as the Vistula. ... In the 6th and 7th
Century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern
homelands and into the ancient German land... -
admittedly only for a few hundred years", etc. The Slavic
'interlopers', by contrast, were seen as 'history's
squatters' who merely 'existed' in surroundings that they 'could not
master' ... Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-
Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe's
'defender' and 'bulwark' against the 'East', and
the 'bearers of civilisation' against 'barbarism'. A half century
earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective
Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia", and an
"outpost of civilisation against barbarism".

...

[T]he claim of Jewish 'homelessness' is founded in a cluster of
assumptions that both negates the idea of liberal
citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the state belongs
to the majority ethnic nation. In a word,
the Zionist case for a Jewish state is as valid or as invalid as the
anti-Semitic case for an ethnic state that
marginalizes Jews. (Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the
Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, 1995, pp 100-1).

Some examples of racist and anti-semitic Zionist dementia:

"We are different, we are a chosen one, and a special one, selected
for purity and holiness. There is no reason to
being a Jew, unless there is something intrinsically different about
him. No, we are not equal to Gentiles, we are
different. We are higher." - Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish
Defense League.

Anti-Arab racism had in fact been evident from the first wave of
settlers in 1882, who (Anita Shapira reports)
behaved as if "they were the rightful lords and masters of this land",
while they believed Arabs "respected
strength and that the language of physical force was the only idiom
[they] understood". When any of the natives
got out of line, the colonial instinct was to reach for the whip. Ahad
Ha'am wrote in 1891 that the Zionists
behaved "hostilely and cruelly to the Arabs, encroaching on them
unjustly, beating them disgracefully for no good
reason" - and they did not "hesitate to boast about their deeds". The
Arabs were seen as 'sly', 'underhanded',
'cruel', 'cunning', 'immoral', 'lazy' and so forth. Hebrew writer Y H
Brenner wrote, upon arriving at Haifa,
"there's another sort of alien in the world that one must suffer
from. ... Even from that filthy, contaminated
lot, you have to suffer." Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Labour Zionist in the
1920s, was also the author of Hebrew hate
literature against the Arabs, describing the Arab as "a murderer,
knife honed and dipped in poison". Anita Shapira
recalls that socialist Zionists like Ben Gurion were "not repelled" by
Greenberg's "malevolent description of
Arabs" because they "answered to their 'gut perceptions' of reality".
Another Labour Zionist, Tabenkin, expatiated
frequently on the need for peace, yet managed to pepper his statements
with descriptions of Arab barbarism, and
the insistence that they "understood one thing only, namely, force".
----
Zionist Herzl now developed a frankly shocking attitude to anti-
Semitism. He wrote that he was ready to understand and pardon it.
Pardoning anti-Semitism allowed him to develop a perverse diplomatic
initiative in Russia, which shook many even in the Zionist camp.
Several months after one of the most bloody pogroms ever, at Kishinev
in 1903, when nearly 50 Jews were killed, Herzl held a meeting with
Siacheslav Konstantovich Pleve, the Tsarist minister held responsible
for the Black Hundred pogromists. Far from being on the defensive,
Pleve told Herzl that the problem was the Jews threatening revolution.
Pleve claimed that young Jews comprised up to half of the membership
of the revolutionary parties. Herzl listened sympathetically. He
reported to the sixth Zionist Congress that year that his supporters
in Russia who backed revolution should start behaving 'calmly and
legally' ... Herzl had been ready to help protect the Tsarist status
quo because he wanted the Tsar to put pressure on the sultan, the head
of the Ottoman Empire, to let more Russian Jews into Palestine. He had
already made a highly offensive and demagogic appeal to the sultan
where, aiding and abetting those voices already gleefully exaggerating
and raising
allegations about Jewish financial power, Herzl had offered Jewish
regulation of the sultan's finances in return for letting the Jews
into Palestine. (From: John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, Pluto Press,
pp 114-5).