Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on May 17, 2017

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Monday, 15 May 2017 10:19

The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in European governments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

by Jonathan Cook

Tom Suarez has written an important history of early Zionism, State of Terror, finding in British archives a wealth of evidence damaging to the Zionist cause. The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in Europeangovernments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. That included at different times dealing with the Nazis and the Italian fascists.

It is also worth remembering that British officials who aided the Zionist movementwere far from immune toanti-semitism either. The Balfour Declaration, 100 old years this year, was Britains promise to the Zionists to help them create a national home at the expense of the Palestinian people. But as Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet at that time, realised, itwas also a very good way for Britains anti-semitic elites to rid themselves of a domestic Jewish population while also creating a colony-statein the Middle East dependent on Britain.

As Suarezs books reveals in shocking detail, any means were seen as legitimate by the Zionists, including violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians, the British, and even fellow Jews, in their efforts to drive out the native population.A lengthy extract from Suarezs book, published by Mondoweiss, gives a disconcerting taste of what the Zionists were prepared to do to win themselves someone elses homeland.

The single most deadly terror attack conducted by the Zionists in Palestine was not the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, as is commonly remembered. It wasthe Jewish Agencys bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The Jewish Agency, the Zionists government-in-waiting in Palestine, wanted to foil British efforts to relocate to Mauritiusthese Jewish refugees fleeingEurope. For the Zionist leadership,it was worthkilling Jews if it aidedthe cause ofcreating a Jewish state in Palestine. As Suarez concludes, the terror attack was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.

Similaruses of terror continued after Israels creation in 1948, part offalse-flag operations to drive Jews out of Arab lands as a way to bolster theJewish majority in the new state of Israel.

Suarez also reminds us that before the rise of Hitler the Zionist movement was far from popular, even among most European Jews:

most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto and worse yet, to do so on other peoples land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people, as Zionism demanded.

Even after Hitler launched the Holocaust, most Jews fleeing Europe wanted to head to the new promised land of the United States, not a territoryunknown to them in a region, the Middle East, most would have associated with deserts and backwardness. But USZionists lobbied their ownofficials ferociously to getthe doors closed to most of these Jews, forcing them to become Zionists in Palestine.

In 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelts provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs [displaced persons], most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelts aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, thrown out of parlours and accused of treason treason, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.

This is archival history that has been intentionally forceddown the memory hole by Zionist organisations, by Israel and by British officials for very good reason. It risks reminding us that Israel emerged out of an unholy alliance between, on the one hand, British anti-semites and colonial officials and, on the other, Jewish ethnic supremacists who had adopted for themselves the ugly ideology of Europes racial nationalists.

US intelligence officials in the Middle East, points out Suarez, understood the roots of Zionist ideology.In a report in 1943, they concluded that Zionism in Palestine wasa type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism.

The tactics of the Zionist leadershiphavent much changed even now that theirstate, Israel, has been achieved. Today, they dont need to blow up hotels to get their way. Instead, its more fanatical devoteesuse respectable kinds of terror to silence anyone, like Suarez, who wants to remind us ofthis hidden history and help us understand how the past can casta very clear light on the present.

I advise you to read this post by him explaining how Zionist leaders in the UK, backed by media like the Daily Mail (a paper that has a long history of anti-semitism and that expressed sympathy for the Nazis back in the 1930s), have worked on a ruthless misinformation campaign to seek to discredit Suarez and prevent him from holding public events. The catalogue of cancelled speaking engagementshe documents istrulyexasperating.

Sadly, too few organisations emerge from this affair with honour. These confected smear campaigns still work because we let them. The Quakers, who have had a relatively good history of supporting pro-Palestinian activism, have let themselves down badly in twice bowing to suchintimidation.

The goal ofZionist activists like Jonathan Hoffman and Zionist organisations like the BoardofDeputies of British Jewsis not just to silence Suarez. They want to pillory himas a warning to anyone who might think to follow in his footsteps. Similar intimidation campaigns in the UK to stop criticism of Israel have been launched against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a raft of Labour activists who support Palestinian rights.

Will any academic, young or old, dare to unearth more of these of official documents telling the real story of Israels creation? Would any of them want to suffer the smears and the irreparable damage to their professional reputations afters seeing what has happened to Suarez.

Similar campaigns against journalists (I have some personal experience of this!) ensure that they mostly keep their heads down too. They wont be publicising or reviewing Suarezs book.

Whenpoliticians, writers, thinkers, journalists and academics are all targeted if they dare to speak even a little truth about Israel or about Zionism, who is left with any prominence who can do so?

Jonathan Hoffman and smear artists like him know the answer very well. Which is why they are not about to stop using misinformation and falsehoods to blacken the name of anyone with integrity like Suarez who tries tooffer some illumination.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

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Israel, Zionism and the smearing of critics - Media with Conscience - MWC News (satire) (registration) (blog)

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