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By Shraga Elam* 8 August 2004 Shraga Elam analyses the growth of Judaeophobia worldwide. He says that the main reasons for this are the criminal Israeli policy against the Palestinians and the wrongdoings of the pro-Israel lobbies. Israel's false claim that it represents all Jews, and the "widespread and ostensive public support for Israeli crimes by many Jews all over the world, strengthens the impression that all Jews stand behind Israel", thus contributing towards Judaeophobia. Ironically, he notes that, in present-day Israel, "we can find many influential people who would have fitted perfectly into the Nazi system, both in terms of ideology and practice". It is clear that anti-Jewish sentiments are growing worldwide. One can no longer disregard the rise in Judaeophobia and consider it always as just propaganda and manipulation. By the way, I prefer to use the term Judaeophobia rather than the more common term "anti Semitism". This is because anti-Semitism is in itself a racist designation which was created by one of the inventors of the Nazi ideology, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879. The Jews might be many things, but they are certainly not race and, in so far as there is something like a Semitic race, the Arab belong to it as well. Judaeophobia has to be confronted and rejected like any other form of racism and, for that purpose, we have to understand its present reasons and causes and not just stop at the isolated "treatment" of superficial symptoms as propagated by many Zionist organizations and Israel. In order not to exploit your patience unnecessarily, I'll tell you in advance that I'm deeply convinced that the main reasons for the increase in Judaeophobia are basically the criminal Israeli policy against the Palestinians and the wrongdoing of the pro-Israel lobbies. These two serious problems often combine with existing anti-Jewish prejudices which, on their own, are rather harmless, at least in most cases. It is the mixture of the Jewish wrongdoing and existing prejudices which lead to the perception of Jews as different and could create a very explosive cocktail. If, in the past, it had been considered wrong and racist to look for the causes of hostility towards Jews in Jews themselves, now it is only right and necessary to do so. At the moment, one of the best ways to fight Judaeophobia is to stop the Israeli crimes! It is as simple as that. I shall now elaborate on this statement and try to make it clear what brings me to this conclusion. It was no lesser a figure than the very renowned Israeli expert on Judaeophobia, Professor Dinah Porat, who observed on Israel state radio that there is a correlation between Israeli actions (we can say atrocities) and outbursts of Judaeophobia. This was, for example, the case in the early 1980s following the invasion of Lebanon or in the late 1980s during the first Palestinian uprising, the Intifada. We can see that all Jews, notwithstanding their individual positions, were then held responsible for the Israeli atrocities. This was not only because of anti-Jewish prejudices, but also partly because of Israel's false claim that it represents all Jews, that it is the state of the Jews. The widespread and ostensive public support for Israeli crimes by many Jews all over the world strengthens the impression that all Jews stand behind Israel. Another example of the kind of Jewish activity that caused a rise in Judaeophobia, according to my own observations, is the restitution campaign in the mid-1990s led by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the Jewish Agency (JA) against the Swiss banks on the issue of the so-called heirless Jewish assets held in Switzerland since the Nazi era. These two Jewish organizations - both leading components of the Holocaust industry, abused a just issue without showing too many considerations for the truth or for the interests of the victims of the Nazis and their successors. These obviously greedy Jewish organizations were perceived as confirming, through their behaviour, the existing Judaeophobic prejudices and thus triggered a rise in anti-Jewish feelings in Switzerland. Some of the leading Swiss Jews were not very happy about this development but the JA and WJC could not have cared less - indeed, they successfully used this rise in Judaeophobia as a weapon against the Swiss. This win-win situation, achieved by swinging what can be called the "anti-Semitism bludgeon or club" (in 1991 the German-Israeli historian, Professor Michael Wolffsohn, spoke of the "Auschwitz bludgeon" - "Auschwitz Keule") is also evident in the silencing of Israel's critics, that is, if they are not careful and mix legitimate and necessary condemnation of Israeli policies with anti-Jewish prejudices. But even if there are no real Judaeophobic manifestations, criticism of Israel, even if true and correct, may be labelled "anti-Semitic" simply because it is unbearable for Israel and its supporters. Take, for example, the case of the German politician of Syrian origin, Jamal Karsli. In March 2002 Karsli, who was a Green party legislator in the assembly of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, protested against Israeli war crimes. He dared to say something that is usually accepted only if expressed by Zionist hardliners and their supporters. Namely, he compared Nazi atrocities with the behaviour of the Israeli armed forces. After seeing on TV that Israeli soldiers had marked the arms of Palestinian captives with numbers, Karsli issued a press release bearing the title: "Israel uses Nazi methods!" This German-Syrian politician was actually not alone in making such associations. The former member of the Israeli Knesset and now minister, Joseph "Tommy" Lapid, who survived the Judaeocide in Hungary, protested against the unbearable similarity between the Nazis' marking of Jews with numbers in Auschwitz and the action of Israeli soldiers. The Israeli national singer, the so-called "war singer" Yaffa Yarkoni, asked at the time in an interview on Israeli army radio: "didn't they [meaning the Germans] do similar things to us?" Yarkoni received death threats from right-wing radicals after she had asked this question and appealed to soldiers to refuse to serve. In the beginning, Karsli was luckier than Yarkoni. He received only mild private criticism from his Green colleagues. Some weeks later, at the end of April 2002, Karsli decided to leave the Green party in protest at its pro-Israel policies (the head of the party, the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had sabotaged proposed sanctions by the European Union against Israel). The next day Karsli joined the Free Democratic Party (FDP), whose deputy leader and a former minister, Juergen Moellemann, known for his criticism of Israeli policy, propagated a position on the Middle East conflict closer to Karsli's. In early May Karsli broke another taboo by criticizing in an interview the strong influence of the Zionist lobby. A ferocious attack was launched against him, as his statements were considered to be anti-Jewish. Juergen Moellemann tried to help Karsli and declared that Israel and Jewish officials are responsible, through their policies, for the rise of Judaeophobia (he used the word "anti-Semitism"). This was, of course, like pouring fuel on fire. The fierce attacks against Karsli, within the context of the ongoing German election campaign, were really aimed against the more important politician, Moellemann. Karsli himself was not important enough to have garnered such a huge scandal which engaged the German media for months. The Karsli affair ruined Moellemann. He was accused of fishing for votes in brown dark waters, meaning votes from fascists. He apologized for his statements and refrained from contacts with Karsli, but this did not help much. On the contrary, he lost the support of many Germans who had seen in him some hope for more honesty within the political system, but were again disappointed by his inconsistency and opportunism. Far from being right-wing radicals, they are fed up with the widespread hypocritical Judaeophilia, the unacceptable and unjustified privileges for Jews in Germany and, not least, the lack of honest and significant criticism of Israeli war crimes. In a desperate act, Moellemann distributed a flyer criticizing Sharon and an important German Jewish representative, Michel Friedman, but stated at the same time his support for Israel's right to exist. This rather moderate leaflet, which could have been formulated by Zionists like "Peace Now" or Uri Avnery, was first called "anti-Semitic" by the German media and then re-defined as "anti-Israeli". None of the journalists and other persons who publicly made negative remarks about Moellemann's flyer seemed to have read it or cared about its real content. It seemed to be forbidden to express another opinion. Moellemann's career and life came to an end after it was claimed that he had financed the flyer with dubious money. He parachuted to death and, while the official version is that it was suicide, there are some who still believe that Moellemann was murdered, which, in a way, he really was. Following the Karsli and Moelleman affair, frustration in Germany has been growing and many people feel that, once again, like in the Nazi era, one cannot express in public clear and obvious facts. This censorship is dangerous in many ways. There is growing tension between private and public opinion. As almost only the right-wing radicals seem not to observe the taboos, they stand a better chance to profit from the situation and to be able to channel the growing frustration. Arabs or Muslims, who also refuse to obey these taboos, are in danger of being marginalized like Jamal Karsli or even face the possibility of being persecuted. In order to help us fight against these very dangerous taboos and develop courageous approaches based on emancipation, we should try to analyse Karsli's two controversial statements: first, that the Israeli army deploys Nazi methods and, second, that the Zionist lobby possesses enormous influence. Nazi methods There is a strong prohibition against comparing the Nazi crimes to almost anything else besides another real or imaginary aggression against Jews. Any other comparison is considered as playing down the Nazi Judaeocide and therefore racist. This tabooization is a modern version of the old Judaeocentric concept of "chosenness": Jewish suffering is special and cannot ever be compared with other miseries. This prohibition is racist and prevents normal historical analysis, as one common and important scientific method is the use of comparison. Comparison as such must not be automatically categorized as racist. It might be wrong or correct, but should not be forbidden. It has to be realized that the Nazi crimes were not really unique for Germans as the eternal victimizers, or for Jews as the eternal victims. There is nothing in the "German" or "Jewish" genes that make these people victimizers or victims. For example, more than 60 years ago militarism was very central in Germany, while in today's Germany there is a very widespread aversion to military conflicts. Conversely, over 100 years ago it was rather rare to find a Jewish militarist, but today Israel is a modern Sparta, with one of the world's most militaristic societies. Indeed, in present-day Israel, more than in many other countries, including Germany, we can find many influential people who would have fitted perfectly into the Nazi system, both in terms of ideology and practice. Unique to the Israeli Nazis, some of whom are victims of the German Nazis, is the desire that the world believe them to be the real anti-Nazis, that they have the right, because of past sufferings, to inflict similar or dissimilar suffering on other people, that they are, by virtue of the suffering of their ancestors, beyond reproach. There is a common mistake of identifying the Nazi crimes only with the industrial extermination of Jews like in Auschwitz, disregarding the fact that the Nazis acted in many other criminal ways and that the plan to build Auschwitz was developed only in 1941, while the Nazis came to power in 1933 and were criminals from the beginning and, of course, acted not only against Jews. We should not overlook or play down the escalatory character of the Nazi brutality. Until 1938, for example, they worked towards a so-called voluntary "transfer" (mass deportation) of the Jews out of Germany and employed much less violence than Israel does today in its pursuit of similar goals against the Palestinians. The Israeli army and the right-wing radical gangs are continuously escalating their violent acts and have plans, like the Nazis after 1938, for forced expulsion. Historically, despite all the differences between the two situations - Nazi Germany and present Israel - there are too many worrisome and obvious structural similarities. The fact that there are still some democratic traits in Israel today while in the 1930s Germany was a dictatorship makes no real difference to the victims, for whom the type of system which oppresses and abuses them is of no consequence. In fact, the Israeli Jewish citizens bear an even greater responsibility than did the people of Nazi Germany precisely because of these democratic traits. They don't yet have to fear the same repercussions as the Germans did under the Nazi regime. If we consider very narrowly Jamal Karsli's accusation that the Israeli soldiers used Nazi methods by putting numbers on Palestinian prisoners, then we have to admit that there are different circumstances involved in the two situations and, for the Palestinians, this was a rather harmless action (compared with other Israeli crimes) which has a mainly symbolic value. The numbers were not tattooed on the hands of the Palestinians and the captive were not (yet) in an extermination camp like Auschwitz. On the other hand, many Palestinians currently live in ghettos and concentration camps. As the former Israeli education minister, Shulamit Aloni, pointed out, we don't have to wait until there are gas chambers for the Palestinians in order to draw such comparisons. We are already experiencing an escalating ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and there are no exact figures of the causalities caused by malnutrition, lack of adequate medical care, etc. Nor are there exact figures on how many Palestinians have left their homeland "voluntarily". I consider the comparison between the Nazi atrocities and the Israeli crimes, despite the many differences, not only historically justified, but mainly politically necessary, as this is an important tool to prevent Israel from misusing the Nazi Judaeocide as a free licence to kill, abuse, dispossess and expel the Palestinians. This is one of the means to show that Israel does not have, and has never had, any moral right to induce guilt feelings, for example, in Europe - guilt feelings among non-Jews that are the result of the long history of persecutions suffered by the Jews and that Israel and its affiliates know perfectly how to play upon and manipulate. Zionist lobby There can be no doubt that the pro-Israel lobbies are among the mightiest in the world. For example, one of them, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is proud of the fact that, according to Fortune magazine, it has been for years one of most influential power groups in the US. One can read it on AIPAC's website and not just in some obscure publication of Jew haters. In our endeavour to find ways to neutralize the pro-Zionist lobbies, we must not demonize them. We have to try to understand how they function and what are their weaknesses and soft points. The tendency to attribute some magical powers to them is not only racist, but is also self-defeating. It is an additional justification for the powerlessness of the people who propagate it. You cannot really be successful against such an omnipotent and supernatural phantom. One of the greatest weaknesses of the pro-Israel lobbies is that they are usually just groups of officials with a very narrow base. There has not been a real effective opposition to them, because too many people, Jews and non-Jews as well, believe that Israel defends Jewish interests and can serve as a refuge in the event of a second Judaeocide. This myth, this illusion, has to be destroyed! It can be proven that Israel endangers not only the Palestinians, but also Jews, and not only in the Middle East. Everyone must be made widely conscious of the fact t that this illusion of a life insurance for Jews is paid for by the sufferings and blood of the Palestinians and is in fact a source of danger for Jews themselves. Israel and its affiliated organizations have been pushing very strongly for the present so-called "anti-terror" campaign in general and especially for the US aggression against Iraq - activities which have created more of the selfsame threats which they had supposedly been aimed at neutralising or preventing. In the case of Iraq, there is no serious evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime in recent years represented a danger to anybody besides the Iraqis themselves. Israel was for sure not endangered by Iraq and Saddam Hussein signalled several times his earnest intention to reach an agreement with the Zionist state. According to various reports in the early 1990s, he was even ready to absorb some of the Palestinian refugees in Iraq in order to help pacify the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Just the same, many supporters as well as opponents of the war against Iraq were, and some are still are, convinced that this aggression was made in order to safeguard Israel from danger. For sure, Israel had an interest in this war, as evidenced by the active role which the Israeli ruling classes and their affiliated Jewish US neo-conservatives played in pushing towards this military act. The name of the game is not more security but more instability and thus higher military budgets and more income for the US and Israeli military industrial complexes (MIC), which are supposed to be once again locomotives for their respective economies. This unholy alliance might one day come to an end. Indeed, even today there are instances of conflict of interest between these partners, and the Israelis have had to live with some painful defeats. For example, many jobs in the Israeli military industries are in danger because it is cheaper for the Israeli army to get weapons from the US for free than to buy them locally. The US military aid to Israel is to a large part a subvention to the US military industries, as most of the money cannot be expended anywhere else. Some Israeli companies try to bypass these restrictions through joint ventures with US firms, but this does not mean that the production will stay in Israel. The strong alliance between the US and the Israeli MICs since 1967 is the main reason for the strong influence of the pro-Israel lobbies. Once this alliance comes to an end or the US MIC loses substantial political and economical importance, this will be the end of the bubble called the strong Jewish lobbies, and not only in the US. Also see: * Shraga Elam is an Israeli investigative journalist based in Zurich and author of a highly-praised book in German on the collaboration of the Zionist leadership with the Nazis. The book, Hitlers Faelscher: wie juedische amerikanische und Schweizer Agenten der SS beim Falschgeldwaschen halfen [Hitler's Forgers: How Jewish, American and Swiss agents helped the SS with laundering faked money], is published by Uberreuter Verlag. Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis. All rights reserved. |
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