Written by: Tayseer Khaled
A few days ago, under the headline (Get out of there), Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest newspaper published in Israel, published an editorial commenting on the crisis that erupted between Russia and Israel, following the Russian Ministry of Justice's appeal to the court with a request to stop the work of the Jewish Agency for its violations of Russian law. In that editorial the paper went so far in its position when it claimed that the Jews of Russia had nothing to look for in that country, warmly recommending that the 120 to 150 thousand who remained in it should begin immediately to pack up and prepare themselves for every possible means of exodus. The state, before it closes its gates and before it wakes up with all its severity, black Russian anti-Semitism. Also, a few days ago, about 40 left-wing deputies in France, most of them communists, signed a draft resolution condemning the Israeli institutional apartheid regime against the Palestinians, which sparked the condemnation of several associations that included the step in anti-Semitism.
What drives Israel and the Zionist movement and their supporters to unearth the sword of anti-Semitism in the face of everyone who criticizes the behavior of Israel and its extensions abroad, whether the organizations of the Zionist movement lobby or the Jewish Agency? Is publicizing the sword of anti-Semitism a just cause, or is it a pretext to deter anyone who takes a just stance on Israeli practices against the Palestinian people throughout the history of their national struggle? I came back here to search for the root of the problem, recalling the Jewish issue and the methods of searching for solutions to it in the course of history, so I was stopped by Karl Marx's position on this issue as an introduction to the search for the answer. Throughout its history, the Jewish question, according to Karl Marx, revealed the corruption of bourgeois society. He accused it of ultimately being responsible for the alienation of man because it spread a vision of the relationship with the world based on selfish need and illegal trade, as the Jewish issue is not related to religion. Continuing that he is not looking for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but rather looking for the secret of religion in the realistic Jew, calling for thinking about the ordinary, worldly, realistic Jew and not about the young Jew, as he put it. Marx proposed to solve the issue of the Jews by eliminating the god of their money, i.e. capitalism.
Regardless of the extent of agreement or disagreement with the conclusion reached by Karl Marx, we must note that capitalism was not a decisive factor in the emergence of anti-Semitism or anti-Semitism. Before, specifically in countries where capitalism was developing rapidly, as was the case in Britain, Belgium, and within France as well. In these countries, hostility to the Jews did not witness a significant presence, unlike other European countries, especially in eastern Europe, that is, in the areas of Jewish settlement, and these are the areas in which the Jewish religious institutions, specifically (the authority of the rabbis), played the role of the agent of the feudal systems and the systems of serfdom, i.e. an agent The authority of the barons and nobles, who had a negative attitude towards the ongoing transformations as undermining their influence and absolute powers. And if Karl Marx had proposed a solution to the Jewish question based on eliminating the god of their money, i.e. capitalism, then I claim that Zionism since its inception has replaced its capitalist idol of worship with a new idol of worship which is anti-Semitism.
Returning to the historical context, in which anti-Semitism appeared, it is known that the social role played by the authority of the rabbis and its civil extensions in many European countries, especially those that embraced large Jewish communities, was in clear contradiction with those social groups, which were shackled by the shackles of the baronial authorities. And the nobles in the countries whose sphere of power was creeping up on the capitalist development and gradually but steadily undermining it. This process, with its accompanying liberation of the masses of peasants and slave serfs, not only from the authority of the feudal barons and nobles, but also from the domination of their agents, had an effect on the growth of hostility against the agents, who were burdening them with taxes, robbing them of their rights, deepening their crises, and contributing to the deterioration of their living conditions. This is a fact that a fair observer cannot ignore, especially in the history of the countries, in which Jewish settlement spread in eastern Europe and western Russia, where Jewish groups lived in semi-closed areas, including cities and villages, or they constituted the largest proportion of the population. In this context, anti-Semitism appeared in popular circles as a reaction to the transformations taking place in those societies.
In this historical context, Zionism also emerged as an expression of a pseudo-reactionary nationalism working to solve the Jewish question in a direction opposite to the Jewish Enlightenment movement, which paved its way and produced advanced Jewish literature specifically in the Yiddish language, paving the way for a movement of integration into its societies. The orientation towards integration did not appeal to the Zionist movement, which identified itself with the national movements in the emerging capitalist countries and proceeded in parallel with them, not only focusing on racial purity, but also on the superiority that would allow it to expand abroad at the expense of the peoples targeted by colonialism in the context of the process of capitalist development. . The political and civil rights carried by the bourgeois revolutions in Europe did not mean much to the Zionist movement and its position on resolving the Jewish question. The nobles are in the regimes that the capitalist development came to refer to a past that has no return.
Let us go back a little to the recent history, not the distant one, in an attempt to find out the policy of the Zionist movement, which saw in integration its main enemy, a policy that used hostility to Jews or anti-Semitism as a tool of control over the Jewish masses to prevent the process of integration. The emergence of anti-Semitism, as well as the Zionist movement, dealt a severe blow to the Jewish Enlightenment movement and the integration movement. The Jews of the Austrian Empire gained complete equality at the end of the 1860s, and so was the case in many German provinces, with the exception of Prussia, which waited until von Bismarck's rise to power. Since that time, European societies began to witness an intense activity of the Zionist movement, an activity that had a role as a brake on the merger movement and a role in subjugating the colonial countries and searching for a position for them in the struggle over colonies between the colonial countries.
At that time, Theodore Herzl oscillated between Palestine and Uganda or other areas targeted by colonialism, but for considerations related to the religious heritage based on myths on the one hand and the status of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial countries’ ambitions in their Arab states. In 1912, he called for the establishment of two Jewish states, the first in Palestine with its limited resources, and the second in Angola, with its many resources.
Both leaders Herzl and Jabotinsky rode the wave of anti-Semitism as a springboard towards achieving the goal and did not find any embarrassment at all to achieve their goal by knocking on the doors of the anti-Semites. When he was Minister of the Interior in the government of Tsar Nicholas II, while the second, that is, Jabotinsky, went to make an agreement with Simon Petliura, the Ukrainian leader, whose forces committed a massacre that killed one hundred thousand Jews in 1918.
As for the most shocking example, prominent leaders in the Zionist movement celebrated the victory of Nazism over liberalism, according to their expression, as was the case of Dr. Joachim Prince, the Jewish rabbi, who rose in the ranks of the World Jewish Congress to become vice president and who was close to Golda Meir and became one of the Prominent leaders in the global Zionist movement. Dr. Joachim Prince sided with the wave of racial supremacy on the Nazi way and wrote a book in German entitled (We are the Jews) in which he said: What the German revolution means to the German nation (Adolf Hitler's revolution) will become clear in the end to those who made it and painted its image. Liberalism has lost its fortunes. Liberalism is the formula for political life that helped the Jews to integrate the Jews. This liberalism is now being defeated.
Not far from these, we find increasing numbers of leaders of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel practically following the same path, bypassing the demonic feature of the tendency of ethnic superiority, and subjugating it, each in his own way, to serve their goals, starting with Ben-Gurion, passing through Benjamin Netanyahu, and ending with even Beir Lapid. Ben-Gurion was an admirer of the anti-Semitic French extreme right, who clung to French Algeria, hated the Jews in France and welcomed them in Palestine, and Netanyahu, who had long flirted with the extreme right in Europe and specialized in transforming all criticism of the occupation into a new, caricatured edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He still admires US President Donald Trump, who derives support from white supremacist groups and whose speeches are not devoid of hostile anti-Semitic language, while Yair Lapid disguises himself as a lamb, follows in his father's footsteps in hating the Haredim and Arabs and asserts in a speech he delivered at the Global Anti-Semitism Forum. Anti-Semites believe that the anti-Semites mainly oppose Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip in a ridiculous approach that has no purpose other than to silence the voices of all those who criticize the policy of the Israeli rulers.
