Read the article in full on Alternet
By Eli Aminov
translated by Ronnie Barkan
May 28, 2016
When Netanyahu enlisted Adolf Hitler in October last year to claim that the responsibility for the Holocaust and the extermination of European Jewry lies with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, and with the Palestinian people, he also stated that the Fuhrer wanted at the beginning of his rule to only expel the Jews and it was theMufti who persuaded him to exterminate them. This rehabilitation of Hitler, as was carried out by Netanyahu, may not have made Hitler into a Zionist but had indeed given him the status of pro-Zionist, like many other anti-Semites besides him.
While Netanyahu was unsuccessful at linking the Palestinian struggle with the Holocaust, this recurring wave of accusations had prompted a surge of attacks which were aimed at purging the critics of Zionism within the British Labour Party. This was all carried out under the pretext of anti-Semitism.
“Anti-Semitism” is a derogatory term which the Zionist movement had associated with anyone who opposes it or its crimes against the Palestinian people. But history shows that Zionism and anti-Semitism are in fact like Siamese twins. Anti-Semitism today is mainly expressed through the hatred of Muslims—the vast majority of whom are Arabs —in Europe, and in that respect Israel is by far the world’s most anti-Semitic country. Along with the expressed opposition to Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, the more traditional anti-Semitism which focuses on the hatred of Jews, is also rearing its head. It is fed by both the Israeli propaganda which claims to represent world Jewry and by the fact that more and more people around the world understand that Israel is an apartheid state, which was built on the basis of a continuous act of ethnic cleansing and the denial of human and civil rights from its non-Jewish subjects.
Building the common interest of anti-Semites and Zionists had already begun by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. His network of relations and lobbying efforts included not only the murderous and dictatorial Ottoman Sultan or the conquest driven German Kaiser, but also the anti-Semitic Czarist regime – the Great Prince Vladimir, Count Witte as well as Plehve, head of the Czarist police and organizer of the Kishinev pogrom. In 1903, Herzl had obtained a letter from Plehve which reads: “If Zionism means the establishment of an independent state in Palestine and promoting the emigration of Jewish subjects from Russia, then it can take into account the moral and material support of the Russian government” (Avineri 197). On his part, Herzl pledged that world Jewry will not attack Russia in response to the pogrom which was carried out by Plehve’s men. Indeed, Zionist diplomacy at its best.
Zionism’s inability to exist without anti-Semitism had already been anticipated by Ahad Ha’am in 1897. In his criticism of Herzl, The Congress and Its Creator, he writes: “From [Herzl’s] notebook we learn that the soul of the whole [Zionist] movement, also to this day, is anti-Semitism alone. It is still dependent on being “influenced” by that which gave it birth, as a baby who constantly needs its mother. And if it had passed away from this world, also [Zionism] will not be able to survive for even a single moment.” Simply put – there is no Zionism without anti-Semitism.
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