Zionism accepts anti-Semitism as the natural, normal attitude of the non-Jewish world towards the Jew. It does not consider it as a distorted, perverted phenomenon, it is a response to anti-Semitism but not a continuation, denunciation or fight against it.
From a Matzpen pamphlet, quoted in Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany by Faris Yahya. One of the most concise ways to put a point on how and why Zionism ends up so tightly intertwined with fascism.
I've been reading Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, a fascinating book that makes an extremely compelling argument[1] that the Zionist cause as well as many individual Zionists threw European Jewry as a whole under the bus during the Nazi years and particularly during the holocaust in order to eke out the highest possible number of Jews emigrating to Palestine in particular. The book emphasizes the solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish liberation, by framing the Zionist philosophy as collaborationist not just in practice but at its roots: Zionism is fundamentally the agreement with the antisemitic trope that Jews are a separate nation who do not belong in solidarity with the other inhabitants of the countries they have made their diasporic homes.
What the book doesn't point out explicitly, but I've realized while reading it, is another aspect to why Zionists seemed so blasé about averting or mitigating the murder of six million Jews[2]. Because who were the six million Jews who died in Europe? They were specifically those Jews who did not immigrate to Palestine. The holocaust was, by and large, a slaughtering of one of the most potent threats to Zionist ideology: non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And Zionists demonstrated (and stated outright) again and again that their first priority was establishing a Jewish state, not the welfare of actual Jews, so of course they didn't lift a finger to stop it. The Nazis were doing them a favor.
Pointedly using only Jewish-authored sources to avoid charges of antisemitism! ↩︎
This is abundantly clear in both their actions and in Zionist primary sources during and immediately after the holocaust. Zionists only started accurately portraying it as the massive culture-defining tragedy that it is once it was safely ensconced in the past—and even then, actual survivors were reportedly look down on in Israel as weak and pathetic. ↩︎
posted on shelraphen.com How will we be remembered? — The Jewish People After the War
How will we be remembered? As the Jewish people, what will history remember of our actions today? What will be the narrative they tell about us? We were victims of the holocaust, and then enacted a genocide ourselves. We have truly gone astray.
Ultimately, the war in Gaza cannot last forever. The situation in Israel and Palestine cannot last forever as it is. Someday, it will end. The question is, how? When it's all over, what will become of the Jewish people? How will be remembered?
This past Saturday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, dedicated to self-reflection and atonement for the harms—both individual and collective—done over the past year. It may has also have been the single year in which Jews, as a collective, have done the most gruesome harm across all our thousands of years of history. This is bitterly painful to reckon with, but now is the time we must reckon with the things that are the hardest.
Shel's post dives into this pain by imagining how Jews will be seen after the war is concluded, once the die has been cast and the world must sit with the outcome. None of the hypotheticals are rosey, because the Jews inescapably have blood on our hands. But it's also worth taking this as a reminder that the future is not yet set in stone, and that we may still work to see the best future that's possible from the imperfect now. We may still perform actions we will be proud of, and our children will be proud of, in the years and centuries down the line.
Next year, in a free Jerusalem.