January 31, 2019 • 35 Comments
The Israeli prime minister's ease with neo-Nazism and revisionist Holocaust history are not as surprising as they might seem, writes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a soft spot for rightwing authoritarians. This is no surprise since Netanyahu is a rightwing authoritarian himself, one who sees Israel as an old-fashioned ethno-state in which Jewish national aspirations are the only ones that count – as his support for last year's "Nation-State Law" makes clear.
But what may come as a surprise is that he also has a soft spot for rightwing authoritarians with a pronounced anti-Semitic streak. Last July, he welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Israel even though Urban has led a campaign to rehabilitate Miklos Horthy, the pro-Axis dictator who sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps and bragged, "I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life." Two months later, he welcomed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who once compared himself to Hitler, saying, "There are three million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I'd be happy to slaughter them."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Wikimedia)
He issued a joint statement with Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki lauding Poland's wartime efforts to alert the world to the Nazi death camps, a statement that Israel's own Yad Vashem Holocaust museum later repudiated on the grounds that it "contains highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field." His government has also supplied weapons to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukraine.
So what's the explanation? If Netanyahu is a hawk's hawk when it comes to enemies of the Jewish state, then doesn't it follow that he should be no less militant when it comes to enemies of the Jews?
The answer is, no, it doesn't, for the simple reason that Zionism's attitude toward anti-Semitism is more ambiguous than people realize. Theodore Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded modern Zionism, made this clear in the 1890s. Rather than combatting anti-Semitism, he argued that Jews should accept it as an ineradicable fact of life. Instead of opposing it, they should make use of it as a lever with which to pry their co-religionists loose from western society so that they would move to Palestine. As he put it in “The Jewish State," the 1896 manifesto that put modern Zionism on the map:
"Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the [emigration] movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before."
Theodor Herzl en route to Israel aboard a ship in 1898. (Wikimedia)
Herzl's goal was twofold: to provide Jews with a homeland and to win over non-Jews by removing an irritant from their midst. Jews, he wrote, "continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as it does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists." The more radical they become, the more Christian society would close ranks against them. The solution was to provide them with a homeland of their own so they would cease subverting someone else's.
"They will pray for me in the synagogues, and in the churches as well," Herzl confided to his diary. Not only would Jews liberate themselves, but they would be liberating Christians too, "liberating them from us."
Zionism's DNA
Modern observers might dismiss such ideas as ancient history since they date to more than 120 years ago. But they have become part of Zionism's DNA. Instead of battling anti-Semites, the movement has repeatedly followed Herzl's advice by emulating them and adopting their techniques for their own purposes.
Please go to Consortium News to read the entire article.
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Source: The Ugly Truth
Former Defense Chief Ya'alon plugs Jews' right to settle ‘every part of the Land of Israel'
February 4, 2019
ed note–borrowing on/continuing with a recently-used theme, if 'things' were as they are supposed to be, Ya'alon's statement would have caused TECTONIC reactions within those human institutions–governments, churches, media, etc–for what his statement portends for the future, given the fact that what his words represent is the declared intention on the part of the Jewish state to take what began as a (relatively) minor conflict between the Jews and Palestinians and to EXPAND it in the most explosive manner imaginable to include every single Arab, Persian, Kurd, Turk, etc presently residing within that giant land mass between the Nile and Euphrates rivers.
Furthermore, due to the secondary and tertiary by-products associated with this statement, the ripple effect of what Ya'alon and what it is that the Jewish state are planning is something that–when considering the size and scale of the rest of the Islamic world not living between the Nile and Euphrates but which represents the larger part of those 2 billion souls counted as the followers of Islam–can only be described with the single word 'apocalyptic'.
But again, in borrowing on/continuing with a recently-used theme, since indeed 'things' are NOT as they are supposed to be, Ya'alon's statement and its declared intention on the part of the Jewish state to take what began as a (relatively) minor conflict between the Jews and Palestinians and to EXPAND it in the most explosive manner imaginable to include every single Arab, Persian, Kurd, Turk, etc presently living within that giant land mass lying between the Nile and Euphrates rivers will NOT have the tectonic reaction that should occur within those human institutions–governments, churches, media, etc–vis what his statement portends for the future, and despite the fact that there may be a few websites that will pick up on it and focus on what it means only for the Palestinians, nevertheless, the larger and–again–more apocalyptic implications associated with it will be completely missed, side-stepped or ignored in toto.
Times of Israel
Days after joining political forces with Israel Resilience chair Benny Gantz, former defense minister Moshe Ya'alon outlined on Sunday his ideological opposition to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, praising the settlement project in the West Bank and saying that the Jewish state "has a right to every part of the Land of Israel."
Please go to The Ugly Truth to continue reading this article.
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Related reading:
"Largest Land Grab Since 1948" — Israel to Expel 36,000 Palestinians From Negev
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