“The victims of [7 October 2023] were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel's oppression.”

 

- UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese (2024)

An elderly Palestinian lady approached me at a conference in Lebanon and said “I understand what you are saying about the difference between Jews and Zionists, but to us they were always just the Jews.”

This drew my attention to what should have been obvious: words have distinct meanings in different cultures and contexts. 

As a person with European sensibilities, I was long aware of the European history of anti-Jewish prejudice and racism, which came to be called antisemitism. This prejudice developed in the Christian empires of Europe, emerging as violent repression during their purges and inquisitions, and culminating in the attempted genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies.

European sensibilities have made many of us distinguish between Jewish people and Zionists, even though, since the late 1940s, most Jewish Europeans have probably come to support the Jewish colony in Palestine. In 2024 that may be changing. 

How different was the situation in the Arab world, where had been no systematic persecution of Jewish people and, on the contrary, in places like Iraq, a long history of peaceful religious co-existence. 

However, after the Second World War, an alliance of British and French governments, with the European Zionists, drove a mass migration of European Jews to Palestine. At first presenting themselves as refugees, the Zionists soon enforced their British-backed claim to large parts of Palestine, saying that these lands ‘belong to the Jews’. Those claims were not limited to Palestine, as Herzl’s ideas of a ‘Greater Israel’ stretched "From the Brook of Egypt [the Nile] to the Euphrates." “The Jews” is how the Zionists presented themselves to the indigenous Arab peoples of the region. 

In many cases, Israelis did not call themselves Zionists, perhaps a little ashamed of the fantastic Zionist mythology which pretends a scriptural rationale for colonisation; they were Israelis, or The Jews, but most of them readily accepted a privileged Israeli entitlement, as some sort of compensation for the crimes against their grandparents’ generation in Europe. 

To this day, Zionists present the Israeli regime as representing a nation of Jewish people worldwide, notwithstanding the fact that many thousands of “not in our name” Jewish people reject the racist regime and its dispossession of and cruelty towards the Palestinian people, while many Hasidic religious groups have never approved of a Jewish state. 

Yet Zionists try to blur any distinction between Jewish people and Israelis, and the Arab peoples of the region still mostly refer to colonist Israelis as ‘The Jews’. Watch videos from Palestine and you will see children and adults more often referring to the Israeli military as ‘Yehud’ than ‘Israeli’.

It is in that context that we must also understand the slogans of Ansar Allah, the ruling Yemeni party, which not only call for ‘death to Israel’ but also add ‘a curse on the Jews’. Zionist writers attack Yemen’s Ansarallah for this “curse on the Jews” slogan, claiming this is some sort of essentialist or European-style anti-Jewish prejudice, thus downplaying the link to the Jewish colonisation of Arab lands. This is disingenuous. 

At the time of writing, the Israeli regime not only occupied all of historic Palestine and parts of Lebanon and Syria but also Yemen’s Socotra Island. It should be obvious that the Yemenis are referring to the Jewish colonists, against whom they now (early 2024) wage war and enforce a naval blockade, to defend the Arab people of Gaza and Palestine.

Racism and Antisemitism

I never liked the term “the Jews” because it seems to denote an essentially distinct people, even a mythical “race”. That notion was created by successive racist ideologies, in modern times those of Nazi Germany and then the Zionists themselves. Racial ‘science’ came to obsess many Zionists, just as it did the German persecutors of Jewish people. Yet we know that, genetically, most Jewish people are ethnically European. There is no distinct Jewish DNA or ethnicity. Even Ashkenazi, for example, is just a region where there were mass conversions to Judaism.

In Germany in the early 1930s, most Jewish people considered themselves “German citizens of Jewish Faith”. The main Jewish groups urged a boycott of the newly elected Nazi regime, while the relatively unpopular Zionists rejected this, creating instead a taxed Transfer Agreement with the Nazis (through the "Tel Aviv"-based Haavara Office) to send capital and people to Palestine. Only after WW2 and images of the death camps did liberal Jewish people come to more broadly support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, even though some, including Albert Einstein, still harboured very deep concerns about the fascist character of Zionist leaders.

As the United Nations’ ‘World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance’ (The Durban Declaration) now clarifies, there is no such thing as separate human “races”, this is a social construct for the purposes of essentialising (then posing as superior or inferior) particular communities, whether based on ethnicity, religion or other factors. Where the 1965 Race Discrimination Treaty (CERD) denounced “any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation [as] scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous”, the 2002 Durban Declaration said at Article 7: “Any doctrine of racial superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and must be rejected along with theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.”

So race is a fiction, but racism certainly exists and has been practiced against many racialised communities, typically during a period of colonization to help justify repression and theft of indigenous land. In that sense the racism of Nazi Germany was aimed principally at Slavic populations (especially Russians) whose land was set to be colonised, but also at Jewish and other internal populations (like the Roma) who were said to undermine or betray the Nazi mission of cultivating and imposing their superior ‘Aryan race’. 

In the classical sense, Zionist ideology is a typical generator of racism, asserting a privileged group of people (mostly Europeans) who are entitled to claim a land which was either “empty” or inhabited by subhuman indigenous peoples. Resistance by those peoples is criminal ‘terrorism’ which must be exterminated by ethnic cleansing and genocidal operations. The criminality of these operations is somehow mitigated or covered up by racist ideology.

Polish scholar Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, wrote in the 1920s of the Ottoman massacres of Armenians and other Christians during World War I. He spoke of this imperial genocide as a “recurring pattern of history”, before his famous 1944 book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’. Imagery of subjugated peoples as subhuman was used by most empires and colonists to justify their genocidal operations. 

In this tradition, the Israeli colonists, themselves the purveyors of deep racism against the indigenous Arab peoples, have tried to ‘weaponise’ accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice as a shield against critics of the Jewish colony. Yet the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’, which Zionists launch against virtually any critic of Israeli crimes, has a very different meaning amongst Europeans and Arabs. For Europeans, it means a sort of anti-Jewish prejudice which might be linked to the racist crimes of European regimes. For Arabs, or peoples of West Asia, it is an inconsequential slogan meant to justify colonial privilege. Are many Arabs prejudiced against Jewish people? No doubt, but that prejudice has its basis in colonial violence. 

This ‘antisemitism’ may be a prejudice, but it is subaltern prejudice founded in colonial subjugation and aimed at those practicing colonial violence, as UN expert Francesca Albanese said of the resistance violence of 7 October 2023, cited at the top of this article. It has no real link to the historic European crimes. Attacking prejudice against Jewish people in the Palestinian and Arab context is like attacking other forms of indigenous prejudice against Europeans and white people. Such verbal attacks have little substance and only serve to cover up the substantial racism of the colonists. 

Let us also consider for a moment that the term anti-Semitism itself is Euro-centric. Jewish Europeans were presented by racial theorists as outsiders with some links to the ‘Middle East’, a fiction which the Zionists came to adopt. In reality, Semitic peoples are those of several language groups in West Asia and North Africa (MENA), principally Arabic and Amharic, but also Hebrew (an ancient language resurrected for the Jewish colony). In the MENA context then, the accusation of anti-Semitism against Arabs (themselves Semites) is a nonsense. 

The ready labeling of any criticism of the Israeli colony as ‘anti-Semitic’ was called a “trick” by former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni. “Anti-Semitism is a trick. We always use it.” It is a trick into which a great deal of effort has been invested. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), ostensibly set up to “foster education, remembrance, and research” into the crimes committed against the European Jews, has presented a suggested “definition” of anti-Jewish prejudice. 

This “working definition of antisemitism” begins plausibly enough, but then turns to focus on almost any critical reference to the Israeli colony. This writer has previously denounced that ‘working definition’. The history, myths and evils of European anti-Jewish racism certainly deserve attention. But racism more broadly stems from imperialism and colonialism. To link criticism of the essentially colonial and racist Israeli regime with anti-Jewish racism is a travesty. 

Of course, the Zionists want it both ways. After themselves equating Jewish people with "Israel", they throw a fit if those critical of "Israel" link that to Jewish people. Yet those of us who maintain the politically correct (European) distinction between Jews and Zionists are never immune from manufactured accusations of ‘antisemitism’. There might indeed be a case for examination of the responsibility of the Jewish community for its collaboration with the crimes of the Zionist regime, just as Jewish historians have questioned German society over its collaboration and complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime. For the time being, that question is answered by the thousands of Jewish demonstrators who have denounced the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, saying “not in our name”. 

In the context of the terrible racist massacres of Palestinian people in Gaza over 2023 – 2024 - called a “textbook case of genocide” by both holocaust scholar Raz Segal and UN human rights expert Craig Mokhiber - Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein, who has long argued that the memory of Jewish genocide was being politically exploited by "Israel", is reported as saying that “the biggest insult to the memory of the holocaust is not denying it but using it as an excuse to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Zionist Antisemitism

Such cynical abuse by the Israeli regime, and attacks on anti-Zionist Jewish historians like Illan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein, should help us reflect on the substantial Jewish rejection of Zionism and Zionist abuse of Jewish people. 

British journalist Alan Hart, in his 2005 book ‘Zionism: the Real Enemy of the Jews’, argued that "the modern state of Israel, the child of political Zionism, became its own worst enemy and a threat not only to the peace of the region and the world but also to the best interests of Jews everywhere and the moral integrity of Judaism itself." Zionism needed and wanted “The Israeli Jews To Feel Frightened”, he said. Indeed the British-Iraqi-Jewish historian Avi Shlaim writes that, in the 1950s, “Mossad carried out bombings to drive [Arab] Jews out of Iraq and hasten their transfer to Israel”. 

The very idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, intended by the British to form a “little loyal Jewish Ulster [the northern Ireland enclave] in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”, was also said to be a device to remove the perceived threat from eastern European Jews, many of whom [like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky] were communists. Anti-Jewish feelings in Europe were often politicized and not confined to Nazi Germany. 

Arthur Balfour, who made the famous Declaration to Lord Rothschild, was said to have been part of a British anti-Jewish elite who backed the Zionist colony as a means of thinning out the European Jewish population. By contrast, Edwin Samuel Montagu, the only Jewish member of the Lloyd George cabinet and only the third Jewish minister in British history, strongly opposed Zionism and the idea of a Jewish colony in Palestine. He said “I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic, and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world … I assume that [this] means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French .. [so that] Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.” Zionism was seen as means of bringing about yet another expulsion of European Jews from their own countries.

The Polish Labour Bund in the 1930s also criticized the Zionists (unpopular amongst Jews in both Germany and Poland at that time) as “zionist anti-Semites” who promoted emigration while they strengthened anti-Semitic forces in Poland. 

On the other hand, support for "Israel" in the USA was taken up by white supremacist groups, some of whom (like the British) also saw "Israel" as a buffer from Arabs and Muslims; by Christian Zionists with an apocalyptic view of the destruction of Jews in "Israel" and others who shared anti-Jewish views. A recent ‘March for Israel’ held in Washington in November 2023 headlined anti-Jewish Christian evangelist John Hagee but did not include any Jewish clergy. 

There are Jewish religious groups who have always opposed the Jewish supremacist state, and have made common cause with Palestinian nationalists. Rabbi Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta says “Zionism is the ideology of the state of Israel, which tries to present itself as the Jewish state. They claim that they represent Jewish religion, they claim that they are speaking in the name of God … They claim that they are the voice around the world of Jewish people that have an attachment with God or the Torah. That’s not true.” 

In March 2024 the Central Rabbinical Congress, North America’s largest Hasidic institution, issued a “scathing denunciation” of Zionism “and its organs [such] as ADL and AIPAC … As American Jews, we are deeply opposed to politicizing anti-Semitism. Also, drawing attention to every minor infraction only gives rise to more hatred. The result is a loss for us and a gain for the Israeli immigration agencies, [which] benefit from any rise in anti-Semitism in the Jewish Diaspora.” Their statement was ignored by most Western media.

Zionists try to brand anti-Zionist Jewish people, secular or religious, as “self-hating Jews”, an expression which has itself been called anti-Semitic. Indeed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek says that Zionism has become anti-Semitic because it promotes hatred of anti-Zionist Jews through the construction of stereotypes such as the “self-hating Jew”. Hence Zionism “has become a leading source of anti-Semitism globally”, he concludes. 

Since the Gaza genocide of 2023-2024, the ranks of publicly anti-zionist Jews have grown enormously. Thousands of Jewish people, under the slogans ‘Not in our Name’, ‘Jews against the Occupation’, ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ and ‘Never Again For Anyone’ have added their voices to the worldwide solidarity demonstrations with Palestinians and against the slaughter in Gaza. In turn, those Jewish people have also been abused by Zionists as ‘self-hating Jews’. 

Such developments make a mockery of the conflation of Zionism with Judaism, as suggested by the appalling ‘IHRA “working definition” of Anti-Semitism’. Nevertheless, that conflation is apparent in the methods of the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which pretends to register acts of race hatred against Jews. However, as is shown by its report on the ‘Campus Climate before and after the Hamas terrorist attacks’, their data is tainted by mixing actual anti-Jewish incidents with criticism of Israel. 

All through the ADL report, there is reference to supposedly anti-Semitic “anti-Israeli protests”, which make people (Jews and non-Jews) feel “uncomfortable about their views of Israel”, and feel “less safe” if others knew of their “Jewish identity or views of Israel”. All that would have been bad enough before October 2023 but to speak of this as ‘anti-Semitism’ after that time, without reference to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, make a mockery of the ADL report. Clearly enough, the worldwide demonstrations in defence of Gaza have been aimed at condemning the Israeli crimes and those who support them. The ADL’s ‘anti-Semitic incidents’ also include the protests of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews, which made Zionists feel “uncomfortable”. 

Zionist writer Robert Goldberg claims that anti-zionist Jewish intellectuals (such as Peter Beinart, Dov Waxman, Uriel Abulof and Michael Barnett) are all some sort of “fifth column” for Hamas, which “seeks to obliterate Jewish peoplehood once and for all”. Goldberg is upset that these people point to the Hamas clarification in its 2017 Charter that it opposes Jewish colonization and not the religion. Hamas in 2017 affirmed “that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish, but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

Hamas distinguishes clearly between Judaism and Israeli colonization, and this is (at least since 2017) their official position and (from the beginning) that of virtually all Palestinian resistance leaders. Their problem is with colonialism, not religion. By contrast, Israelis have become major abusers of Jewish people. 

We should beware the many fake claims of racism by colonists who have always been the worst purveyors of racism and its deadly consequences.