Guest post By Joel Belasco
I grew up in a secular Jewish household after World War 2, with the Holocaust as a haunting frame of reference. There was a romantic attachment to Israel and we had a tin collecting box for the Jewish National Fund on the hall table. Israel could do no wrong because it was showing the world that Jews could be strong and would not tolerate the antisemitism that had been part of their history.
What was not understood by those with a romantic view of Israel as the David facing Goliath, was that the realisation of Israel as a Jewish state was part of a longer term project to displace Arabs in the colonisation of Palestine.
The modern state of Israel was not the realisation of a biblical prophecy, and its belligerent, aggressive ethnonationalism is not a justifiable response to the genocidal barbarity that was suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. It actually pre-dated those horrors.
During the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged among Ashkenazi as a response to antisemitism experienced by Jews in Europe and Russia. The movement was religiously influenced, promoted the use of Hebrew as its language, and wanted a Jewish homeland in what it saw as its historic place of origin in Palestine.
The Zionist project always was effectively colonial in nature, seeking to transplant people from a European or Russian environment into Palestine, which was already occupied by an Arab population who were Muslim, Christian and Druse. Displacing the Arab population of Palestine was always an objective of Zionists who espoused an aggressive ethnonationalism using biblical references as their justification.
Theodor Herzl, a driving force in developing Zionism politically at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as, “an outpost of civilization against Barbarism”.
At this time Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Jewish settlers from Europe and Russia had started to acquire land in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1902 with the objective of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Before the First World War ended, the British Government was lobbied by Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
Together with other political concerns, the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour published a declaration which stated:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
This objective was then incorporated into the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.
Zionism did not then, and does not represent all Jews. The Bund, for example, held a contrasting position to the religious ethnonationalism of Zionism. It was left wing, secular, based on trade unions, transnational in outlook, opposed to war, and it promoted Yiddish as the common language of Jews. It did not support the idea of a Jewish homeland, but advocated struggling for equality and justice in the regions in which they lived.
In many ways, consigning Jews to their own homeland could be seen as getting rid of a problem nearer home.
The political radicalism of The Bund was smothered by the political machinations of Zionists, and ideologically by the support given to Zionism by influential Jews like Montefiore and Rothschild.
Initially, Jewish settlement in Palestine was accepted by the majority population but as numbers increased following the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish settlers met more resistance.
The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”) was formed in 1920 ostensibly to defend Jewish settlements. It was outlawed by the British authorities and operated with restraint until World War 2. As the British refused to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration, the Haganah used terrorist tactics to bomb infrastructure, and even a ship carrying Jewish refugees. (1)
Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, the Haganah was dissolved as an underground force and integrated into the Israel Defence Force (Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el).
The Irgun, which broke with the Haganah in 1931, was a self-declared Zionist paramilitary organisation based on the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky:
“Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.”Jabotinsky’s “revisionism” rejected the notion that British Empire would support the creation of a Jewish state, and advocated establishing Jewish army to fight for Jewish sovereignty. Politically he was a nationalist and an economic liberal supporting a free market with minimal state intervention, and personal freedom, i.e., a right wing libertarian in today’s terms.
The Irgun was a terrorist organization and described as such by the British, the United States, and the United Nations. Among other acts, in 1946 they bombed the King David Hotel, which was HQ for the British Mandatory forces. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 46. The Irgun was also responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers in 1948.
In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein described the Irgun as a ”terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization”.
After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun was incorporated into the Israeli Defence Force. Its political wing was the right wing, Herut (Freedom) Party.
Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, founded the Likud party and became Prime Minister in 1977. The Likud has been in government since 1977 and is currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), under the leadership of Avraham Stern, broke away from the Irgun in 1940. They described themselves as terrorist with the aim of evicting the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Lehi were fanatics whose pursuit of their Zionist ideological goal seems to have blinded them to political realities. Unbelievably, Stern sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the belief that they would be more accommodating to Jews than the British. The modus operandi of the group focused on political assassination. Stern was shot by British detectives whilst being arrested in 1942.
“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: {Ye shall blot them out to every last man}”– from the Lehi underground paper He Khazit.
Yitzhak Shamir, a leading member of the Lehi, who had argued for the legitimacy of the group’s terrorist actions, later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983.
The Israeli State initially integrated the Lehi members into the IDF but some of its members assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman (Count of Wisborg) and diplomat who was the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Seeing him as a puppet of the British and the Arabs in advocating a peace plan, the Lehi shot him as he was driven through Jerusalem.
The Israeli Government initially condemned the action and arrested Lehi members. However, before the first elections in Israel in January 1949, Lehi members were granted amnesty. In 1980, the Lehi Ribbon was introduced as a military award “for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel.”
There is a clear historical connection between the colonising aspirations of Zionists and their militaristic, religious ethnonationalism as given voice by the philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
In 2005 a memorial day was created to honour Jabotinsky.
In 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the event, saying, “I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.” (Quoted by Lazlo Bernat Veszpremy in Hungarian Conservative.)
Zionism is a continuous thread in the Netanyahu family. Benjamin’s grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a Polish Zionist Rabbi. The family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920 and their name was changed to Netanyahu (Hebrew for Nathan). Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary when he was living in New York. Upon the death of Jabotinsky he became executive director of the New Zionist Organisation of America.
In 2009 he is quoted as saying in an interview in Maariv, a Hebrew language daily:
“The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him to compromise. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”In the wake of WW2, with awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, and with thousands of displaced people, the establishment of a Jewish State became a prominent international issue. But Britain still held a mandate of the territory of Palestine and had been negotiating with Arab leaders since WW1. However, the shadow of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a homeland to Jews, loomed large.
Proposals for power sharing were challenged strongly by Zionists who could see the realisation of the project they had been working towards for more than fifty years.
Arabs living in Palestine, seeing the colonial aspirations of the Zionists, began armed resistance.
The British surrendered the mandate in 1948, and the United Nations took control and made the decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Zionist government of Ben Gurion, which had recruited groups of Zionist terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi,) to the Israeli Defence Force, was immediately engaged in the Arab-Israeli war.
For the Arabs, this became al-Nakba as they were expelled from villages, towns and areas in which they had lived for centuries.
By the end of the conflict, 750,000 Arabs had been displaced and consigned to refugee camps, and by appropriating Arab land, Israel had expanded its territory from the 55% allocated by the UN to 78%. Around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 6,000 Israelis. Hundreds of villages were sacked and there were in the region of 70 massacres of Palestinians.
What was, initially, an expedient move was soon recognized as having a geopolitical strategic benefit in locating a state with European roots among the Arab countries of the Middle East, and the USA was quick to seize that opportunity.
The Zionist project that had begun in nineteenth century Europe and Russia and given a militaristic, anti-Arab colonising philosophy by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, had become a reality.
Its ethnonationalist, colonialist, aggressive xenophobia was usefully concealed by the sympathy extended to Jews after their experiences under the Nazis. The cultural and historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust has been used, cynically one might say, to recruit all Jews to the Zionist colonial project with romantic notions of Israel as the realisation of a religious prophecy. A powerful ideological exercise has been conducted by the Zionist Israeli State which has appropriated and weaponised the Holocaust, and used it to attack any criticism of it and its actions, as anti-semitic.
The Zionist project is deeply embedded in the Israeli State; two former Prime Ministers were active leading members of Zionist guerilla terror groups, and the current Prime Minister comes from a family of Zionists with strong links to Jabotinsky, and he recognises him as a guiding political influence.
I have read that he has Jabotinsky’s sword in his office.
(1) In 1940 the Patria was carrying about 1800 European Jewish refugees who, having been refused entry to Palestine, were bound for Mauritius. While it was anchored in the port of Haifa, the Haganah exploded a bomb on the ship which was intended to cripple it and prevent it leaving. The blast sank the ship and killed 256 people and injured 172 others. The survivors were rounded up by the British authorities, put on another ship and taken to Mauritius where they were kept in abominable conditions by the British until the end of the war at which point, they were given the choice of where they wanted to go.
