The Zionist
project was only able to garner the support of most Jews due to the
Holocaust. But the self-defence argument no longer works during its own
genocide in Gaza
A man carries
a child while walking past a building destroyed by Israeli bombardment
in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on
9 October 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP)
The shift in the attitude of these Jews, however, was neither immediate nor spontaneous. The Zionist movement worked assiduously and ultimately successfully to convince them to support its colonial-settler programme.
Zionist coercion
After the war, Zionists used pressure and coercion
to bring the surviving European Jews to Palestine. These Jewish
survivors were still living in the Displaced Persons camps and wished to
move to the United States, whose borders remained closed to them.
In fact, it was a closure that the Zionist movement, including American Zionists, strongly supported.
Committing a real genocide to prevent an imagined genocide is not an argument that sells easily
American Zionists even refused to consider the possibility of
offering Holocaust survivors "a choice" in lieu of Palestine.
Then-President Franklin D Roosevelt's adviser, the prominent Jewish
civil rights lawyer Morris L Ernst,
proposed that such a choice be offered as it "would free [the
Americans] from the hypocrisy of closing [their] own doors while making
sanctimonious demands on the Arabs".
To Ernst, "it seemed that the failure of the leading Jewish groups to support with zeal
this immigration programme may have caused the President not to push
forward with it at that time". Ernst "felt insulted when active Jewish
leaders decried, sneered and then attacked [him] as...a traitor" for
suggesting that such a choice be given to the Holocaust survivors in
Europe.
Notably, the Zionist movement's adamant opposition to Jewish
migration to the US persisted well into the late 1980s as Jews began to
leave the Soviet Union in large numbers. While most wanted to go to the
US, the Israel lobby successfully pressured President George HW Bush's administration to impose severe limits on their numbers so that most would be forced to go to Israel.
And yet those same American and European Jews who supported the
Zionist movement and later the Israeli state did not themselves become
Zionist, if Zionism means self-expulsion and becoming colonial settlers
in Palestine and later in Israel.
Despite the Nazi genocide, a struggle continued between the leaders
of American and European Jewry on one side and Israel's claim to
represent Jews worldwide on the other.
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In 1950, the president of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein,
signed an agreement with Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to
clarify the nature of the relationship between Israel and American Jews.
In the agreement, Ben-Gurion declared that American Jews were full
citizens of the US and must only be loyal to it: "They owe no political
allegiance to Israel."
For his part, Blaustein declared that the US was not "exile" but
rather a "diaspora" and insisted that the State of Israel did not
formally represent Diaspora Jews to the rest of the world.
Interestingly, Blaustein added that Israel could never be a refuge for
American Jews.
He emphasised that even if the US were to cease to be democratic and
American Jews were to "live in a world in which it would be possible to
be driven by persecution from America", such a world, he insisted,
contrary to Israeli claims, "would not be a safe world for Israel
either".
These reservations aside, the support for Israel in the wake of the
genocide of European Jewry would increase considerably only in the
1960s, with the rise of what historian Peter Novick has called "Holocaust consciousness".
This was the result of the instrumentalisation of the genocide by
Israel and the US to defend Israel's racist regime and its ongoing
crimes against the Palestinian people and as part of a Cold War campaign
to smear the USSR as "antisemitic".
The Eichmann Trial
in 1961 and Israel's multiple invasions of three Arab countries in
1967, which it portrayed as an existential war to prevent yet another
Holocaust against Jews, raised the level of Jewish and Christian western
support for Israel to extremes of zealotry.
Weaponising genocide
But if Israeli and Zionist arguments insisted that the existence of
Israel is the only guarantee against another holocaust targeting world
Jewry anywhere in the world, they also insisted that Israel itself could
at any time be the victim of another holocaust to be committed by the
Palestinians and the Arab states.
The "Holocaust industry's" leading ideologue Elie Wiesel, a vapid anti-Palestinian racist who justified Israeli crimes in the name of the Holocaust until the end of his life, insisted
that those who did not support Israel's multiple invasions in 1967 of
Arab countries, or those who resisted Israel and fought against it to
restore their rights, are enemies of the Jewish people in its entirety:
"American Jews," he averred, "now understand that [Egyptian President]
Nasser's war is not directed solely against the Jewish state, but
against the Jewish people".
In 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories to liberate them from Israeli occupation, Wiesel wrote
of being for the first time in his adult life "afraid that the
nightmare may start all over again". For Jews, he said, "the world has
remained unchanged...indifferent to our fate".
American Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who later served as the director
of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, believed that God
himself supported Israel in the 1967 war because of his love for the
Jewish people, and to make up for why he failed to defend the Jews
against Hitler. Greenberg asserted:
"In Europe [God] had failed to do His task...the failure to come
through in June [1967] would have been an even more decisive destruction
of the covenant."
Whereas Hitler's genocide helped transform the majority of world
Jewry from anti-Zionists to pro-Zionists, Israel's constant invocation
of the Holocaust as what awaits Jews if they failed to support Zionism
and Israel ensured ongoing Jewish support for it. But what Israel did
not realise is that its weaponisation of genocide could one day work
against it.
This possibility began to be apparent during Israel's massive 1982
invasion of Lebanon, during which several countries accused it of
committing genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.
Also, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982, the United Nations General Assembly passed
a resolution condemning the massacres as "an act of genocide", with an
overwhelming 123 countries voting for the resolution with 22 abstentions
and none opposing it.
At the time, the Soviet Union and other European and Latin American
countries declared: "The word for what Israel is doing on Lebanese soil
is genocide. Its purpose is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation."
In light of such savagery, many American and European Jews began to
distance themselves from Israel and its Zionist ideology. The irony of
supporting Israeli genocide for a people who had been themselves
subjected to genocide was too much to bear.
As Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism intensified in the next
four decades, so did American and European Jewish opposition to Israel,
which perceived what Israel was doing as "genocide".
A survey conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute
in June and July 2021 found that 22 percent of US Jews believed that
Israel was "committing genocide against the Palestinians," 25 percent
agreed that "Israel is an apartheid state", and 34 percent believed that
"Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is similar to racism in the
US".
Of those under 40 years old, 33 percent believed that Israel is
committing genocide against the Palestinians. These numbers were
collated two years before the current genocide began.
This anti-Zionist attitude, which has increased in number and intensity since then, has also been adopted by many British, French, and German Jews.
That the International Court of Justice has endorsed
the accusation of Israel as perpetrating a genocide eliminated any
remaining doubts in the eyes of many. It is precisely the question of
genocide that has mobilised these Jews to oppose Israel.
'Another Holocaust'
Given Israel's ongoing weaponisation of the Holocaust as a
justification for it to commit genocide against the Palestinian people,
it was hardly arbitrary or surprising that the Israelis and their
western allies proclaimed that the Palestinian resistance operation of 7
October killed the largest number of Jews since the Holocaust,
as if the Palestinians targeted Israeli Jews for being Jewish and not
for being colonisers and occupiers of Palestinian land and oppressors of
the Palestinian people.
It is this key argument that continues to be repeated by Israel and its allies in defence of the ongoing Israeli genocide.
Israel insists that its leaders' calls for genocide against the
Palestinian people are really in self-defence to prevent yet another
genocide of the Jews
Israel understands very well that it is the genocide of European Jews
that legitimised its establishment on the land of the Palestinians, and
only the fear of another such genocide would justify and legitimise its
actual genocide of Palestinians today.
Israeli propaganda, in fact, insists that it is the Palestinian and
Arab resistance, with Iran's support, that wants to commit genocide
against Israeli Jews.
It further claims that the aim of al-Aqsa Flood Operation was not for
Palestinians, who had been incarcerated since 2005 in the Gaza
concentration camp, to break out of their prison by attacking their
prison guards, but rather to launch a war that would annihilate the
Jewish people.
It is based on these Israeli fabrications that Israel insists that its leaders' and media's calls for genocide against the Palestinian people are really in self-defence to prevent yet another genocide of the Jews.
According to this logic, it turns out then that Israel is committing
genocide against the Palestinians in order to prevent another genocide
against the Jews. Committing genocide is, therefore, the only way to
save Israel.
Despite their interminable repetition by western leaders and the
western press, these arguments have not convinced all Jews of the
necessity to support Israel in this war.
Colonial genocide
Born of genocide, Israel and its propagandists believe that the
weaponisation of the Holocaust should remain the guiding principle for
justifying all of Israel's crimes.
This begins with its right to colonise the land of the Palestinians,
expel the majority of the Palestinian people, and subject those under
its yoke to the most sadistic forms of oppression, including apartheid
and genocide, while allying itself
with the German genocidaires who committed the very Judeocide that
justifies Israel's existence in the eyes of many of Israel's supporters
in the first place.
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But that logic has now come to be used against Israel itself,
threatening to undo the Jewish settler-colony. The legitimate fear that
supporters of Israel are experiencing now is that genocide turned out to
be a sword that cuts both ways. Just as its weaponisation has helped
establish Israel and shield its crimes in the West from any
condemnation, it could now bring about the end of its barbaric regime.
What this means is that committing a real genocide to prevent an
imagined genocide is not an argument that sells easily, except among
genocidal states like the United States, Germany, France, and Britain.
It is these countries whose own genocides have always been justified
as necessary to prevent genocide of their own settlers. One need not go
back to the white American settlers' slaughter of Native Americans to
illustrate this.
Indeed, a short historical journey to World War Two, when the US
committed nuclear genocide against Japan, demonstrates this very
clearly. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed
upwards of 215,000 people, were justified then and continue to be defended today as having been necessary to prevent anywhere between half a million and tens of millions of American casualties.
Nazi Germany's genocide was also committed in the name of protecting
the German people from annihilation and subjugation by an antisemitic
imaginary "Jewish conspiracy". The genocide of native Australians was
also seen as necessary to protect the white British colonists, as was
the French genocide in Algeria necessary to defend France and its
colonist pieds noirs.
For many of the Zionist faithful, Israel has finally come to be seen as a perpetrator of genocide and not as its victim
Israeli leaders are not reinventing the wheel with these arguments,
but rather are part of a long chain of settler-colonies and colonial
mother countries who have always deployed them to justify their
genocides.
The difference is that Israel has weaponised the Nazi Holocaust of
Jews to such an extent on a global scale, and claimed its existence as a
reparation for it, that it can only be judged based on its relationship
to genocide.
That the Zionist project was only able to garner the support of most
Jews in the time of genocide attests to this organic relationship
between Israel and genocide in the view of most of the country's
supporters and detractors.
Israeli leaders and its media's ongoing calls for the genocidal
annihilation of the Palestinian people during the past year have changed
the nature of this relationship. For many of the Zionist faithful,
Israel has finally come to be seen as a perpetrator of genocide and not
as its victim.
Moreover, Israel's rationale that it has the right to commit
genocide, expand its territory, and remake the Arab world around it into
a "New Middle East", as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
averred recently at the United Nations, reminds many in the West - Jews
and gentiles alike - of past genocidal regimes that always had to be
opposed and resisted.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.