No illusions:
neither Zionism nor its state can be reformed!

By Yorgos Mitralias

Although it may seem inappropriate to talk about a few Israeli hostages held by Hamas at a time when Israel is methodically exterminating tens of thousands of Palestinians before the eyes of the whole world, we believe that we must nevertheless return to the issue of these hostages because it is very revealing of the profoundly inhuman and monstrous nature not only of the Netanyahu government but above all of Zionism itself in all its forms!

By targeting the Hamas negotiators in Qatar, the Israeli genocidaires have done two things: first, they have definitively buried the hopes of the families of the Israeli hostages that Netanyahu would reach an agreement with Hamas allowing for the release of the hostages. And second, they have fully vindicated those who have always claimed that Netanyahu and his ministers are only interested in the fate of these hostages insofar as it serves the pursuit of their war of extermination against the Palestinian people.

That said, it must be noted that this double clarification of the intentions of Netanyahu and his government is causing incomprehension and questions among people of good faith: they cannot understand why Netanyahu is sacrificing the Jewish Israeli hostages, showing himself to be totally insensitive to the pressure from some of his compatriots. The answer to these questions is to be found not in the present but rather in the past of the Zionist movement and its state.

Indeed, we must admit that Netanyahu’s attitude towards the Hamas hostages is a mere misdemeanor compared to the crime of indifference to the Holocaust and even the systematic refusal to do everything possible to save the Jews of the Diaspora who were victims of the Shoah, committed by someone like the founder of Israel and historic leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion! This same Ben-Gurion who, before the central committee of his MAPAI party on December 7, 1938, uttered these famous and terrible words after London, shocked by Kristallnacht, offered to take in thousands of German and Austrian Jewish children: “If I knew it was possible to save all the children of Germany by settling them in England, or just half of them by settling them in Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children, but also the entire history of the Jewish people”…

One might think that once the “Final Solution” was put into effect, Ben-Gurion and the other historical leaders of the Zionist movement would have changed their attitude toward Jews persecuted by the Nazis. This was not the case. Thus, Eliahu Dobkin, director of the Jewish Agency’s Immigration Department, declared in the fall of 1944: “Zionism’s mission is not to save the Jews of Europe, but to save Palestine for the Jewish people.” It was as if this Zionist leader was giving a definitive negative response to the desperate calls for help from Slovakian Rabbi Weissmandl, who had asked in vain for funds from his “brothers (Zionists) in Palestine” to buy the survival of Slovakian Jews from the SS leaders. Exasperated by the prolonged silence of the Zionist leaders regarding the fate of the Jews destined for death, the heroic Rabbi Weissmandl, who had already managed to delay the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz for two years, finally hurled the following anathema at them: “How can you remain silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands upon thousands, now six million Jews, were being murdered. Silent while tens of thousands are still being murdered or are about to be murdered? Their broken hearts implore you for help while deploring your cruelty. You are brutal, and murderers too, because of the cold-blooded silence with which you observe.” (1)

As we can see, the cynical sacrifice of Jews on the altar of Zionist projects (the construction of the State of Israel, the extermination of the Palestinians, or the building of Eretz Israel) is not the preserve of its extreme right-wing revisionist wing, to which Netanyahu belongs. This sacrifice was also practiced systematically by Ben-Gurion and his Labor and liberal friends to such an extent that it can be said to be an integral part of Zionist practices…

Another practice of Netanyahu’s government that shocks and remains incomprehensible to public opinion in our countries is that Israeli leaders not only regularly associate with the cream of the traditionally anti-Semitic international far right, but also consider them—quite rightly—to be Israel’s best allies and supporters. How is it possible that the country of the descendants of Holocaust survivors is allying itself with notorious anti-Semites or those nostalgic for the fascist and Nazi regimes of the interwar period?

In reality, by currently allying himself with racists, fascists, and anti-Semites, Netanyahu is merely perpetuating a “tradition” of the revisionist current of Zionism to which he belongs. For more details, here is what we wrote a year ago in our article Netanyahu: a pure-blooded fascist by origin, training and mentors :

“As we wrote in our articleWhen Einstein called “fascists” those who rule Israel for the last 44 years “do we have to consider then as surprising and “abnormal” these “strategical alliances” and the flirting of Netanyahu and his friends with the international riff-raff of sworn anti-communists and racists, who “by chance” are also sworn anti-semites? Not at all. Their first teacher was none other than the father and theorist of Zionist Revisionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Motivated by his pathological hatred of the Russian Revolution, Jabotinsky even allied himself in 1922 with the Ukranian anti-communist and nationalist war-lord Symon Petliura, whose army carried out between 1917 and 1922… 897 anti-Jewish progroms, in which at least 30,000 Ukrainian Jews were massacred!”. And we went on to point out that “Bibi’s father, who served as Jabotinsky’s secretary, followed Abba Ahimeir when the latter came into conflict with Jabotinsky, who rejected his proposal to become a… Jewish Mussolini at the head of a clearly fascist Zionist party. A close collaborator of this ideologue and fascist theorist, Bibi’s father edited the publications of Ahimeir’s organization, which forged fairly close ties with Mussolini’s fascist Italy, but never achieved the same with Nazi Germany, although he did not hesitate to praise Hitler in 1933!”.

But it gets worse with Netanyahu’s mentor and his terrorist organization, for Lehi founder and leader Avraham Stern had no hesitation, in the middle of the World War, in sending a letter to Hitler via the Third Reich’s embassy in Beirut, proposing an alliance in due form, despite being aware of the Nazi regime’s persecution of the Jews! It’s exactly this cynicism and total lack of scruples that characterize Jabotinsky, Ahimeir, Begin and Shamir – in other words, all Netanyahu’s forerunners and masters of thought – that we find today in the alliances Netanyahu is forging with the crème de la crème of the far right and global fascism, who couldn’t care less whether his arch-reactionary and obscurantist allies are anti-Semites and epigones or nostalgists of the pogromists and other genocidaires of the Jews of yesteryear!” (2)

However, it would be naive to think that associating with fascists and notorious anti-Semites is the sole preserve of Netanyahu and his revisionist “ancestors.” For example, it was during the terms of Labor Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin that Israel’s economic and military alliance with apartheid South Africa reached its peak, with Israel blithely breaking the economic and military embargo imposed on the racist South African regime by the international community. Thus, Israel became South Africa’s closest military ally—which also included collaboration in the field of nuclear weapons (!); the South African army’s largest foreign arms supplier; and the creator of South Africa’s arms industry! And it was Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who, in 1976, raised a toast in honor of South African Prime Minister John Vorster on an official visit to Israel, celebrating… “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa”! An eloquent detail: Vorster had been interned in 1942, accused of being a “Nazi sympathizer.”

The conclusion is obvious: Zionism and its state cannot be reformed, because neither Netanyahu’s current sacrifice of Israeli hostages nor his privileged alliances with all the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic scum around the world are anything new for Zionism. Quite simply, Netanyahu is now doing nothing more than pushing Zionist logic to its extremes. This is unfortunate not only for the Palestinians, the entire Middle East, and all of us, but also for Israeli Jews themselves… 

• Also see: The new apartheid: The rise of Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state. This is an extended pamphlet on the reactionary history of Zionism from its earliest inception.
• Video: the historic role of labor Zionism. This short video shows how labor Zionism’s mission was to attract European Jewish workers to Palestine in order to repress the Arab workers.

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Notes

1. Elective affinities of executioners -The Rafah Ghetto like the Warsaw Ghetto: https://www.cadtm.org/