Israeli Nationalism: Creating the New International Anti-Semitism; Conflating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism
By Steven Jonas
“Israeli Nationalism” is not a commonly used term. But I think that it is a useful one. It conflates the Expulsionist Zionism that has been central to the policies of the Israeli Right since the post-World War I days of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, with the “One State Solution” which is the policy of the current Netanyahu-led coalition (of the Rightist and further-Rightist) Israeli government. In re Zionism, modern political Zionism, which began in late 19th century Europe, was a direct response to the development of political anti-Semitism which began at the same time. The modern State of Israel, created as is well-known by a UN resolution, exists primarily because after World War II no nation wanted to take “all those Jews” (who had somehow survived the Holocaust) just as no nation had wanted to take them before the War (see “The Evian Conference“).
The Jewish Agency accepted the Partition Plan that was provided for by the United Nations in November 1947. The Six Arab Nations surrounding the UK Mandate did not. Those events, plus the geographical results of the Six Day War, is why Israel looks like what it does today. The “Oslo” process of the 1990s, which was intended to lead to a “Two-State solution,” could have worked. But the Israeli Right made sure that it did not. What is going on now in Gaza is a continuation of the long-term policy of Expulsionism (of which, by-the-way Israeli Nationalism never openly speaks) and of cultural genocide (as originally defined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944). It is being intensified by the Israeli Nationalists in Gaza and the so-called “Settlers” (better called “dis-possessors/occupiers”) in the West Bank.
But the focus of this column is not on the history/events as summarized briefly above, on which I have written several columns recently. It is rather on what Israeli Nationalism has done to reignite Global anti-Semitism and how it has put it, for the first time, on a factual basis, that is on a description of something that “Jews Have Done,” that is on something that Jews have really done this time around, as we shall see just below. For all of the previous forms of International Anti-Semitism have been centered on made-up stories-plots-conspiracies describing events/plots that did never actually existed. The ultimate tragedy here is that the previous fictional “Jewish plots/conspiracies” were gradually fading away from common usage in many parts of the world. Now however, based on what Israeli Nationalism is actually doing in Gaza and the West Bank, International anti-Semitism is being given a new lease on life, to repeat, for the first time in history with a factual basis.
Anti-Semitism has a long history, reaching back to before the Common Era. In the Roman Empire it did not appear to have a common historic-theological basis. It was St. Augustine, around the turn of the 5th Century C.E., who gave it its first common, programmatic, center: “The Jews Killed Christ.” Indeed, that would become a common doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church until, under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, it was formally revoked at Vatican II. (A U.S. Rabbi, Mark Tanenbaum, played a major role in the final formulation and pronouncement of the policy.)
Political anti-Semitism, that is the use of anti-Semitic propaganda for electoral political purposes was first developed in Austria and the Prussian Empire beginning in the late 1870’s. It included a strain of Jew-expulsionism, which, as it happened, led directly to the development of early political Zionism, under the leadership of Theodor Herzl. “Zionism” had been in Jewish religious lore, “Next Year in Jerusalem” concluding the Passover Seder text, for many centuries, but it had never been an active poltico-historico-force, until the development of late 19th century European anti-Semitism.
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Source: OpEdNews.com