Zionism, Israel, and the Arabs

This post will take the form of a response to talklikeapirat




reply to post by talklikeapirat

The logical fallacy on your part is that you are equating being critical of the Israeli government policies and clearly seeing how destructive and damaging they are for the Palestinian and the Israeli population, with being supportive of Hamas or radical Islam.

The first premise of your statement is that there is something wrong with Israels policies with regard to the Palestinians. First, any approach to this subject has to be based on characterological features of the party in question, which can be had by analyzing their ideology and their history.

So whats the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis? We have to go far back, back to the decades of the late 19th century, in order to get at the root of how Zionism came to be. Towards the end of the 19th century - and far before - Jews were being persecuted by the Tzarist government in what was known as the pale of settlement (Belarus, Ukraine, Eastern Poland). The news spread across Europe and was known throughout Germany and France. In the late 1800's, France was dealing with antisemitism which culminated in the Dreyfus trial. Theodore Herzl was working as a columnist at the time in Paris and and wrote about it. This whole experience of his led to his taking up the "Zionist idea", which he picked up from the Jews who were moving to the holy land at that time (which began in the late 1840's). This resulted in his book "The Jewish State". In the Jewish state, Herzl talks about the underlying causes of Jew hatred. His conclusion: because Jews always lived as a minority amongst a foreign population, they became an object of contempt; the solution? The Jews, just like the French, and the German, etc, deserved a land to call their own.

This is the historical basis for a Jewish state. The Jews were 'wanderers' not of their free will, but due to religious persecution by the dominant population - whether Christians or Muslims. It's true that the Christians were far worse, but Jews suffered from time to time under the Muslims as well. In all times, Jews were exploited by having to pay a hefty Jizya tax that left the community mostly impoverished. Only a few Jews managed to 'live well', as bankers or merchants or advisers, while the majority were the lowest of the low and the poorest of the poor. If it weren't for the deep sense of community, and for the wealthy Jews who helped support the community, it would have been far worse for them. Jews also were forced to wear special clothing, to address a Muslim in a tone of submission, to pay the tax in a self-deprecatory way, etc.

The Jewish Agency was setup by European Jews to buy land for Jewish immigration. Polish and Russian Jews were the people who turned the swamps and deserts of Palestine into arable land fit for growing and building upon. The areas bought extended from as south as jaffah, up through Tel Aviv and Haifa, to as far west as the Galilee. This was the "basis" of the 1937 Peel commissions partition plan, which was taken up again in the 1947 UN partition plan.

So, first thing to dismiss is, the notion that somehow Zionism is akin to Nazism. It's quite a repulsive libel given the context in which Zionism emerged.

After the holocaust, the Jewish question reached the worlds ears. They saw for themselves how the persecution of Jewry over the centuries was what led to the Nazi holocaust. They were guilty, and DESERVED to be guilty, because they were partly responsible. Christian antisemitism smoothly transitioned into the ethnic-racial antisemitism of the 18th,19th, and 20th centuries. The Europeans knew this, but what about the Arabs? The Muslims didn't "do anything" they later argued, to be punished for Europe's sins. But there's two problems with this problem. First, a completely lack of sensitivity to the plight of the Jews. This was mainly due to the influx of Nazi propaganda into the Arab world during the 1940's, mostly in Cairo, Damascus, Palestine and Baghdad. This network was set up by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini, who spent the war years in Berlin with a staff of 80 beaming Arabic Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. So, after Germany loss, and the Mufti was being sought for war crimes against Jews and Serbs, the Arab League pressured the French to extradite him to Egypt, which they did. The Mufti briefly became the "symbolic head" of Hassan Al Bannah's Muslim Brotherhood during his stay in Egypt, and during his return to Palestine in the 50's he served as an agent of their cause. Thus, after the war, Arabs had very little sympathy for the Jews, mostly because of the Nazi propaganda over the last decade combined with a nascent interest in the Palestine-Jewish conflict. The second issue is Islams own responsibility towards their treatment of Jews. They weren't "sinless" either, as they sanctimoniously imagine themselves to be. They too had 3.5 disenfranchised Jews without a place to call home, subject to a kleptocratic Jizya tax and the humiliation of being regarded and treated as an inferior creature, following an inferior religion.

The Arabs lacked both sympathy for the Jews, and a willingness to allow them some space to establish a state for themselves. The current state of Israel is the size of New Jersey or El Salvador. The total land area of the Arab League – the 22 Arab countries in existence – is 13,333,296 km2. It’s total population is 400,652,486. Israel is 20,770 km2, or, 661 times smaller than the total area of the Arab Leagues 22 member countries. If counting the Sephardic Jews who live in Israel alone – and not Ashkenazi Jews – you have 2 million people. 400 million (Arab League) divided by 2 million = 200. Yet, Israel is 661 times smaller than the Arab League. In short, if things were “fair” and we wanted to accord each people equal plots of land according to their numbers, Sephardic Jews would be entitled to a good chunk more of land above what they have in Israel. This is just a little experiment in population and land area, to highlight an area that is seldom mentioned, though I think it’s relevant in showing how entitled Arabs feel with regard to the lands of the greater middle east. Jews, Kurds, or Berbs, essentially don’t matter; they’re unjustly asked to accept minority status, even though the parts these groups live in – such as Kurdistan (parts of southern turkey, eastern Syria, northern Iraq and western Iran) – is clearly ethnically Kurdish, speaks Kurdish..

Arab’s also lacked sympathy for the fact that Jews were forcibly evicted from the land by the Romans in the 2nd century. They were the only people to have established a state there. The only ones to have left relics of an ancient civilization there – such as the Herordian architecture, ancient synagogues, Dead Sea scrolls and countless coins found in the Temple Mount area and Jerusalem. These are more than physical relics of an ancient civilization; they were signs of commonality, of the Jewish community, that has persisted from the most ancient of times to the present day. It is the land of the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible, the ideology, theology and spirituality which was born and thrived there. This surely must account for something, just as I sense that Tibet means something very important to the Tibetan people and their tradition.

In the last decades the Palestinians have suffered the most in this conflict and this has started long before Hamas seized control of Gaza. You are constantly trying to justify any actions of the Israeli government as a means of self defense.

Which brings me to my second part: Why does Israel feel threatened by the Palestinians?

Forget about the 1929 Hebron Massacre or the 1929 Safed Massacre which saw 67 and 18 Jews murdered by crazed Arabs, the forerunners of today's Palestinians. This was the first indication to the Jews how serious the Arabs were. What makes this so typical of Arab-Muslim extremism, was that these Jews were natives of the land, Jews that had lived there for hundreds of years. Not immigrants from Europe. To the Muslims, it was "Jews" period, the sheer notion of a self autonomous Jewish state in Dar Al Islam, that infuriated them. And, perhaps rightly so; the Arabs have been nursed from a culture that stresses superiority, strength, power; Muslims believe in a God identified with will, power, as Al Ghazalli describes Allah as being. The Jews able to live freely, according to their own law, in Al Quds (Jerusalem) infuriated them. Their religion teaches that Jerusalem - the Jewish city - became Islamic territory (Al Quds) when they conquered the territory from the Byzantine Christians in the 7th century.

This has always, till this day, been the general attitude of the Muslims/Arabs towards Jews; one of bellicosity, and belligerence, where Arabs will only live with Jews if Jews accept to live under Muslim rule. Any other situation is a Nakba - a "calamity".

It is either the Palestinians own fault and they should suffer for electing the Islamists or it is a simple necessity for Israels' self-preservation.

The Islamists are a "necessity for Israel's self preservation"? How so? They're an extension of the resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood plotted its way into power, from being weak in the 1960s and made illegal by Nasr, to gaining strength in the 80's, 90's, and 2000's, until gaining power. Israel should just leave them as and treat them as a 'necessity', as if they weren't actively plotting Israel's destruction? I hope my sarcastic tone is making clear to you why Israel has responded as they have. They have no choice. They either die a slow death and let Hamas grow slowly but surely; or, they try to do this, take a risk, defend themselves against moral relativists who will stoop to whatever moral low - such as drawing in IDF soldiers, or planes, to kill Palestinian non-combatants.

WikiLeaks: Israel aimed to keep Gaza economy on brink of collapse

I can already tell you're too emotionally invested in this to think clearly, but i'll answer anyway.

If Hamas' growth means Israel's destruction, than Hamas' economy must be made to struggle. Economy is just another form of warfare. If Hamas were to thrive economically, they'd get the money and means to fight Israel. Therefore, subverting their economy is a necessary measure towards isolating Hamas. And again, if you are remotely interested and not only pretending an interest in peace, to let Hamas grow means Israel's destruction; it means facilitating the advancement of Islamism in the region.

They are "equal" in that they are denying a large portion of their societies the right to live as they choose.

Oh, so delegate the intricate political difficulties to democracy? Let people choose? That is absurdly naive. As if their aren't parties actively undermining each other. And the party mostly to be worried about are the Islamists. Not the Israelis, who have given back large swathes of land to secure peace.

I have to applaud your work here. There will be many that say you have left out important facts, but short of writing a book, you have to leave out some things.

At least on ATS, part (perhaps the main part) of the problem is that there is not a strong desire for facts. How can people discuss anything unless they have at least a halfway decent knowledge of the subject? The best they can do is to be willing to be taught.

There is no agreement here even on why Hamas, Iran, and the other states wish to destroy Israel. Self-defense, punishing a wrong doer, blind religious hatred, or simply "I'm stronger than you are machismo?"

Without posts like yours, there would be little sense in discussing the broader Arab-Israeli difficulties.

You use the terms Arab, palestinian, Muslim, Islamist And hamas interchangeably....

You do know there are Arab Christians.

This whole post smells of discrimination.

reply to post by MDDoxs

I'm honestly asking. Will you please, for those of us who are learning, point out which of his statements are false?

Would you also offer facts which are necessary for understanding the historical situation?

Originally posted by MDDoxs
You use the terms Arab, palestinian, Muslim, Islamist And hamas interchangeably....

You do know there are Arab Christians.

This whole post smells of discrimination.

edit on 19-11-2012 by MDDoxs because: (no reason given)

You Sir are spot on. Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are prime examples of Arab Christian diversity.

Many times in the past have segments of Jewish people been defrauded by false messiahs but none of the false messiahs has been as fallacious and delusory as the lie of Zionism.

Let it be clearly understood that never in Jewish history even in the time of Jeroboam or Achav have such hostile atheists stood at the helm and the voice of the Jewish people as today.

Zionism believes in living for now to accumulate all you can in this lifetime regardless of the infliction cause upon others, and not preparing for a next life, this is the fundamental dangerous differents with Zionism.

The Torah, in Tractate Ksubos, folio 111, specifies that the creator, swore the Jews not to occupy the holy land by force, even if it appears that they have the force to do so, and not rebel against the nations.

And the creator warned that if his oath be desecrated, Jewish flesh would be "open property", like the animals in the forest.
These are words of the torah, and these concepts have been cited in Maimonides' "Igeres Teimon", "Be'er HaGola", "Ahavas Yehonosson", and in "Toras Moshe" of the Chasam Sofer.

Rabbi Shaul Brach of Kashoa once said:

"Before thinking up the idea of Zionism, Herzl wanted all Jews to convert to Christianity. When he was laughed at, he developed the second idea which was able to have more effect, since thousands of Jews began to believe they could be Jews without the Torah of Judaism."

"I am also surprised at the leaders of the Agudah who want thousands of Jews to move to Eretz Israel.
How can they ignore the welfare of their children, since there is no other place on earth where there is so much heresy and sectarianism as in the Holy Land in our day."

The Chafetz Chaim, Rabbi Israel Meir Hakohen once said:
"In my opinion it is clear that the Zionists are from the offspring of AMALEK."

Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman once said:

"It is certain as the sun shines that the Land will vomit the Zionists out, because the Land is the Palace of the King....I don't say this either to curse or to bless, but because these are things which are written in the Torah and which will take place."

Originally posted by charles1952
reply to post by MDDoxs

 

I'm honestly asking. Will you please, for those of us who are learning, point out which of his statements are false?

Would you also offer facts which are necessary for understanding the historical situation?

Well, Islam doesn't have an issue with Jews to start with. Remember, roughly 15-20,000 Jews live in Iran, they are not persecuted, live normal lives and truthfully love their home. From what I remember, they were also offered around $10,000 to move to Israel which most declined. Do those Jews count?

reply to post by solarstorm

You Sir are spot on. Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are prime examples of Arab Christian diversity.

Yet at the same time, all of them are getting ready to be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.

reply to post by DarknStormy

Well, Islam doesn't have an issue with Jews to start with. Remember, roughly 15-20,000 Jews live in Iran, they are not persecuted, live normal lives and truthfully love their home. From what I remember, they were also offered around $10,000 to move to Israel which most declined. Do those Jews count?

That's only true because they consider themselves Iranian first and Jewish second.

These Jews are under heavy restrictions, yet they consider it normal living because they don't know any different.

reply to post by dontreally

The Jews were 'wanderers' not of their free will, but due to religious persecution by the dominant population - whether Christians or Muslims.

Nope, had nothing to do with us. This was Yahveh's doing, for their rejection of Jesus the Christ. The last 2000 years was punishment for not paying attention to Gabriel when he told them the Messiah would come riding into Jerusalem on a donkey colt. Everything that happened to them was his doing and was prophecied of by the prophets because the land meant more to them than Yahveh did and he punished them for it. Don't go laying this on us and don't go pretending you're innocent, you people brought down on your own head his judgement against you just like you did from the time of Judges down to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah's time, except this time the Idol was your tradition and not a carved image.

reply to post by dontreally

good work especially for the first part but still it remains:
1-Judaism is a religion neither a race nor a nation.
2-you mean none of Jews converted to Christianity or Islam !
3-can a country be built just based on religion according to international laws.
4-evidences show that Israel is spreading like a colonialism machine !
5-how can Israel decide for people in Gaza or Palestine according to which international law !

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reply to post by dontreally

Hamas' ideology is an impasse for liberals. Do you have a problem with it? Its either their way or our way - neither can coexist when the latter - the Islamists - refuse to tolerate difference.

You yourself were setting the moral standard for the principles of ethical conduct for all the parties involved in this conflict. To declare the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be a battleground for a cultural war, requires a clear definition of the own fundamental values. This 'war' would be already lost, if it means to abandon, if only temporarily, the same principles you are pretending to defend.

But you missed the point.

The first premise of your statement is that there is something wrong with Israels policies with regard to the Palestinians.

Again, the premise is that for you, any criticism of the Israeli Government is akin to being against Israel and therefore tantamount with supporting the Islamists.

No, you guys are running around without offering a solution - aside of course from siding with Islamists against Israel.

Dealing in absolutes is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. None of us would enjoy the freedoms we have today, if that would still be the ideological basis of our society or any debate about the values that define it.

First, any approach to this subject has to be based on characterological features of the party in question, which can be had by analyzing their ideology and their history.

Any approach to the subject, if there is 'something' wrong with the policies of the Israeli Government regarding the Palestinians, has to be based on the question, if it is violating basic human rights, international and israeli law.

The report disputes Israel's claim that the Gaza war would have been conducted as a response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, saying that at least in part the war was targeted against the "people of Gaza as a whole".

Intimidation against the population was seen as an aim of the war. The report also says that Israel's military assault on Gaza was designed to "humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability".

The report focused on 36 cases that it said constituted a representative sample. In 11 of these episodes, it said the Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot "while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags".
Talking to Bill Moyers Journal, Goldstone said that the committee chose 36 incidents that represented the highest death toll, where there seemed to be little or no military justification for what happened.

According to the report, another alleged war crime committed by IDF include "wanton" destruction of food production, water and sewerage facilities; the report also asserts that some attacks, which were supposedly aimed to kill small number of combatants amidst significant numbers of civilians, were disproportionate.

The report concluded that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention by targeting civilians, which it labeled "a grave breach". It also claimed that the violations were "systematic and deliberate", which placed the blame in the first place on those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations. The report recommended, inter alia, that Israel pay reparations to Palestinians living in Gaza for property damage caused during the conflict.

source

The Dahiya doctrine is a military strategy put forth by the Israeli general Gadi Eizenkot that pertains to asymmetric warfare in an urban setting, in which the army deliberately targets civilian infrastructure, as a means of inducing suffering for the civilian population, thereby establishing deterrence.

...

The doctrine is defined in a 2009 report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel as follows: "The military approach expressed in the Dahiye Doctrine deals with asymmetrical combat against an enemy that is not a regular army and is embedded within civilian population; its objective is to avoid a protracted guerilla war. According to this approach Israel has to employ tremendous force disproportionate to the magnitude of the enemy’s actions." The report further argues that the doctrine was fully implemented during Operation Cast Lead

Richard Falk wrote that under the doctrine, "the civilian infrastructure of adversaries such as Hamas or Hezbollah are treated as permissible military targets, which is not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: state terrorism."

source

Since 1949, Israel is a member of the United Nations and with its admission it has agreed to adopt the Unversial Declaration of Human Rights.

273 (III). Admission of Israel to membership in the United Nations

Having received the report of the Security Council on the application of Israel for membership in the United Nations,1/

Noting that, in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter,

Noting that the Security Council has recommended to the General Assembly that it admit Israel to membership in the United Nations,

Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it "unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them from the day when it becomes a Member of the United Nations",2/

Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 3/ and 11 December 1948 4/ and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel 5/ before the ad hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,

The General Assembly,

Acting in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure,

1. Decides that Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;

2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.

source

To this date, Israel does not have a written constitution acting as a legally binding contract, but in 1994 the Knesset amended two basic laws, Human Dignity and Liberty and Freedom of Occupation. The statement was introdued, saying: "The fundamental human rights in Israel will be honored (...) in the spirit of the principles included in the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel."

reply to post by dontreally

So whats the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis? We have to go far back, back to the decades of the late 19th century, in order to get at the root of how Zionism came to be.

Since i'm not sure what your reasons are to leave out or distort essential facts in your attempt to provide a historical context, i will ask you directly.

Why did you leave out any information about Theodor Herzl and his affiliation with outsopken anti-Semites, the diversity of jewish community throughout europe, the complex nature of anti-semitism in regards to the Dreyfus-affair?

Herzl’s strategy, which he was not to live to see fulfilled, was to appeal to the statesmen and rulers of Europe for an imperial alliance with the fledgling Zionist movement. In the course of his travels, he met with the German emperor, tsarist ministers counts Witte and von Plehve, the Ottoman sultan, Lord Cromer, Joseph Chamberlain, King Victor Emmanuel and even the pope! His message was always the same – help the Zionist movement and you are helping the Jewish opponents of socialism and revolution.

It is not surprising that the main supporters of political Zionism, which began towards the end of the 19th century, were in fact the anti-semites. And the most vociferous and bitter of Zionism’s opponents were, and remain, Jewish. When Theodore Herzl wanted to hold the first Zionist Congress in Munich in 1897, he was forced to move it from Germany to Basle in Switzerland because of the opposition of the local Jewish community.

On 4 June, a Zionist student, Pincus Dashewski, tried to assassinate Krushevan, and Plehve decided to crack down on the movement. Herzl rushed to restore the status quo ante, journeying to St Petersburg to see Plehve on 8 and 13 August. The events are known from Herzl’s Diary. The Russians were concerned about the effect of Kishinev on Western opinion and he prepared a memo for the minister. If the Russians would intervene with the Turks on behalf of Zionism, and subsidize Jewish emigration, the announcement could be made at “Our Congress, which will meet at Basel from the 10th to the 23rd of August ... This would, at the same time, put an end to certain agitation.” Von Plehve explained his concern about the new directions he saw Zionism taking:[

"Lately the situation has grown even worse because the Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We used lobe sympathetic to your Zionist movement, as long as it worked toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez à un converti [You are preaching to a convert]. But ever since the Minsk conference we have noticed us changement des gros bonnets [a change of bigwigs]. There is less talk now of Palestinian Zionism than there is about culture, organization, and Jewish nationalism. This doesn’t suit us. We have noticed in particular that your leaders in Russia ... do not really obey your Vienna Committee."

The climax of Herzl’s search for anti-semitic allies came with his visit in August 1903 to the tsar’s interior minister, von Plehve, who had organised the pogroms at Kishinev barely four months previously. As Herzl was explaining Zionism, Plehve interrupted him: “You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti” (You are preaching to a convert).

Herzl’s meeting with the Tsarists was not well received by the Jewish people. The left wing enemies of Zionism simply saw him as a traitor, but even in the WZO opinion was against the venture from the outset and at the Basel Congress it was agreed not to discuss the whole affair. Only one delegate rose in defence of their leader’s meeting with the butcher of Kishinev: Jabotinsky. He argued that it was vital to separate tactics and ethics and also defended Herzl’s line that there was no room in the movement for a socialist faction. Pandemonium broke loose and Herzl had to rush onto the stage to get him away from the podium.

Zhitlovsky, in 1915, said of Herzl:

[He] was, in general, too “loyal” to the ruling authorities – as is proper for a diplomat who has to deal with the powers that be – for him ever to be interested in revolutionists and involve them in his calculations... He made the journey, of course, not in order to intercede for the people of Israel and to awaken compassion for us in Plehve’s heart. He travelled as a politician who does not concern himself with sentiments, but interests ... Herzl’s “politics” is built on pure diplomacy, which seriously believes that the political history of humanity is made by a few people, a few leaders, and that what they arrange aamong themselves becomes the content of political history.

reply to post by dontreally


Theodor Herzl and the Dreyfus affair

Born amidst a wave of defeats for the Jews, not only in backward Russia, but in the very centres of industrial Europe, modern Zionism's pretensions were the noblest conceivable: the redemption of the downtrodden Jewish people in their own land.
But from the very beginning the movement represented the conviction of a portion of the Jewish middle class that the future belonged to the Jew-haters, that anti-Semitism was inevitable, and natural. Firmly convinced that anti-Semitism could not be beaten, the new World Zionist Organisation never fought it.
Accommodation to anti-Semitism - and pragmatic utilisation of it for the purpose of obtaining a Jewish state - became the central stratagems of the movement, and it remained loyal to its earliest conceptions down to and through the Holocaust. In June l895, in his very first entry in his new Zionist Diary, Herzl laid down this fixed axiom of Zionism:

In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to "combat" anti-Semitism.

His universal pessimism caused him to misjudge totally the political environment of late-nineteenth-century Western Europe. In particular, Herzl misunderstood the Dreyfus case. The secrecy of the trial, and Dreyfus's soldierly insistence on his innocence, convinced many that an injustice was done.

The case aroused a huge surge of Gentile support. Kings discussed it and feared for the sanity of France; Jews in remote hamlets in the Pripet Marches prayed for Emile Zola. The intellectuals of France rallied to Dreyfus's side. The socialist movement brought over the working people. The right wing of French society was discredited, the army stained, the Church disestablished.

Anti-Semitism in France was driven into isolation lasting until Hitler's conquest. Yet Herzl, the most famous journalist in Vienna, did nothing to mobilise even one demonstration on behalf of Dreyfus. When he discussed the matter, it was always as a horrible example and never as a rallying cause. In 1899 the outcry compelled a retrial. A court martial affirmed the captain's guilt, 5 to 2, but found extenuating circumstances and reduced his sentence to ten years. But Herzl saw only defeat and depreciated the significance of the vast Gentile sympathy for the Jewish victim.

The French government understood realities better than Herzl and acted to head off further agitation by reducing the balance of the sentence. Given the success of the struggle for Dreyfus, French Jewry - right and left - saw Zionism as irrelevant. Herzl savaged them in his Diary:

"They seek protection from the Socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order ... Truly they are not Jews any more. To be sure, they are no Frenchmen either. They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism."

The Iron Wall

Zionism in the Age of the Dictators

unholy Alliance

reply to post by dontreally


If your goal was to enable a better understanding of the history and ideology of the Zionist movement, why did you fail to mention the collaboration between political Zionism and Nazi Germany?

The darkest chapter for the jewish people in all of history was the Holocaust. Since its inception, modern political Zionism 'prioritised above everything the building of a Jewish state in Palestine'.
If it would further the cause, the return to the Holy Land, pragmatic utilisation of anti-semitism was justified. This strategy reached its horrific culmination with the genocide of the Jews during the second World War.

The founders of the Zionism movement at the turn of the 20th century argued that the Jewish "question" in Europe could only be solved by the Jewwish people leaving the continent and creating a homeland in Palestine.

It would be the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930's and the Holocaust that would see the Bund destroyed as a political movement and its place as a representative of the Jewish people of Eastern and Central Europe taken by the Zionists.
It is clear that there is much evdience that the Zionists took this opportunity not to help the Jewish people as they were being slowly led to the death camps, or alert the world about the plans of the Nazis, but to collaborate with them and use their position to save their own, and not the bulk of Jewry who being exterminated towards the end of the war.

During the Second World War, the main non-Zionist organization in Europe was the Socialist Bund. Although equipped with few resources, it did the most to publicize the Holocaust and seek support for Jewish resistance in Europe.

On the other hand, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was an international organization with a large intelligence network. Specifically, it was the only Jewish international organization which had liaison offices inside Nazi Europe. It had direct organizational links with Zionist groups throughout Europe and direct access to and political influence with the Allied powers.

It was also involved in arms smuggling and financial operations, but this vast apparatus, which then had illegal armed forces in Palestine, was not used to publicize the Holocaust or support beleaguered ghetto fighters or aiding rescue activities. It was accused of covering up the crimes of the Nazi regime until the Allied powers decided to publicize it, not assisting Jewish resistance groups, and not making attempt to rescue the bulk of European Jewry.

One advocate of not helping the Jews of Europe was the Zionist leader Yitzhak Greenbaum, whose son was described in Nazi-Zionist Collaboration once as a "exceptionally notorious" Kapo (Jewish policeman) at Auschwitz.
Greenbaum , was the head of the Rescue Committee for European Jewry, and later became a cabinet minister in Israel's first Government in 1948.

In a speech given in Palestine in 1943, he indicated that buying land from the Arab population of Palestine was more important than rescuing Jews in Europe, and, as he admitted after the war, he had even called for less to be said about the extermination of the Jews, so as not to distract attention from buying land in Palestine. It is a shocking indictment of Zionism and its wartime leaders.

The Zionist policy during the Holocaust is best summed up in the words of Greenbaum speaking on 'The Diaspora and the Redemption' at a Tel Aviv meeting in Palestine during February 1943:

For the rescue of the Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have. When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land.
The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraization of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the 'Keren Hayesod' (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! And once again No!"

As Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, in his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse (1977) commented:

The rescue committee of the Jewish Agency falsely bore the name 'rescue'. It would be more appropriate to call it the Committee for Covering Up, Ignoring and Silencing . . . the thoughts of Zionist officials and especially the chairman, Greenbaum, were steeped in plots and schemes to use the holocaust and its consequences to build up the national home and to realize the demands for establishing a Jewish State.

Kasztner's List

Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Originally posted by DarknStormy

Originally posted by charles1952
reply to post by MDDoxs

 

I'm honestly asking. Will you please, for those of us who are learning, point out which of his statements are false?

Would you also offer facts which are necessary for understanding the historical situation?

Well, Islam doesn't have an issue with Jews to start with. Remember, roughly 15-20,000 Jews live in Iran, they are not persecuted, live normal lives and truthfully love their home. From what I remember, they were also offered around $10,000 to move to Israel which most declined. Do those Jews count?

And lets not forget, the Ottoman empire provided shelter to many Jews who were persecuted in Christian countries at the time, Spanish inquisition etc. How time flies by