A Zionist Rabbi Praises Europe’s Right-Wing Racist Parties as Friends of Israel
by Michael Pröbsting, International Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 19.10.2018,www.thecommunists.net
A right-wing Israeli website published remarks of the influential Rabbi Eliezer Melamed. Melamed heads the ultra-reactionary Zionist Har Bracha Yeshiva – an Israeli-Jewish settler institution in Samaria (close to Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank).
This article reports: “Rabbi Melamed wrote in his widely-read weekly column in Besheva Magazine Friday that Israel need not fear creating strong bonds with the European Right, including the Austrian Freedom Party, which is a member of the Austrian governing coalition.” (1)
The article further quotes from Melamed column: “But in recent years, the extreme right wing movements have been undergoing a process of change. (…) Leaders have emerged who want nothing to do with the racist Nazi heritage, and who openly support the state of Israel.” These leaders “have distilled the movements’ nationalist positions, and now they express a proper position, which demands maintaining the European people’s national, religious and cultural identity.”
“Rabbi Melamed recounted that several leaders of the European Right, including Freedom Party head Heinz-Christian Strache, visited Israel several years ago. Strache visited Har Bracha and gave a speech that was “fervently Zionist” and which extolled the achievements of the Jewish state, describing it as a bulwark in defending Europe from Arab terror.”
One has to admit that this reactionary Rabbi speaks the truth to a certain degree. The extreme right-wing, racist parties have become fanatic supporters of Israel. They do so, as the Rabbi acknowledges himself, because these racist parties view Israel as a white, imperialist bulwark against the oppressed and impoverished Muslim and Arab people.
Surely, many right-wing racists in Europe still don’t like Jews at the bottom of their heart. But they hate the migrants, the Muslims, the people of color hundred times more!
The Blairites and the pathetic pseudo-leftists in the British Labour Party (e.g. AWL, Jon Lansman and other Momentum leaders), the highly influential pro-Zionist forces in the Party of the European Left (represented by leading figures like Gregor Gysi of the German LINKE or Walter Baier, the Coordinator of its Think Tank transform, etc.), the so-called “Anti-Deutsche”, etc. – they all denounce pro-Palestinian solidarity activists since years. (2)
They slander our solidarity movement as “Anti-Semitic” because we call for the boycott of the Zionist Apartheid state – the very state which has expelled the Palestinian people from their homeland for more than 70 years and which has killed more than 200 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border in last months alone. The Austrian party of the PEL even expelled our section from its annual festival under this pretext. (3)
We have always rejected this as reactionary smear which only serves as a cover for the pro-Israeli sympathies of these pseudo-leftists. It goes without saying that every socialist and every democrat opposes any form of Anti-Semitism. But only a reactionary hypocrite can ignore the fact that the main form of racism in Europe today is not Anti-Semitism against Jews but racist Islamophobia against our Muslim migrant brothers and sisters.
On must draw a clear line: on one side are the supporters of Western imperialism and Israel who, in one way or another, denounce the Palestinian and Muslim migrant masses as well as their anti-racist friends as “anti-Semitic”. This camp has many different currents within its ranks – from extremely right-wing racists to liberals and pseudo-“socialists”. But they are united in their support for the West and for Israel and in their opposition against the Palestinian liberation struggle.
On the other side are the Palestinians and Muslim migrants and all those who defend their rights. They are oppressed and exploited by the West (and increasingly Russia too) and Israel. Naturally, this camp has also many different currents within. But they are united by their defense of the oppressed and their resistance against the oppressors.
The RCIT and its Jewish and Arab members in Israel / Occupied Palestine have always been part of the second camp. Our comrade Yossi Schwartz, a Jewish Anti-Zionist since more than five decades, has been imprisoned by the Israeli state three times because of his unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people. Our Austrian section repeatedly faced physical attacks by the pseudo-leftist “Anti-Deutsche” as well as threats by the political police and parliamentary inquiries because of its pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist activities. The author of these lines has been sentenced by a court because of such activities. (4)
We know that many other solidarity activists have made similar experiences. It is crucial to join forces in our struggle in defense of the Palestinian people and the Muslim migrants!
Footnotes
(1) Gil Ronen: Nationalist rabbi: European Right no longer anti-Semitic, 12/10/18 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/253164
(2) See on this e.g. Michael Pröbsting: The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital. Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books,Vienna 2013, pp. 337-340, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/
(3) See on this e.g. RKOB: KPÖ schließt RKOB aus und macht den Weg frei für Frauenschläger der Anti-Nationalen Szene. Wiederholter körperlicher Angriff auf Genossin Gunić am Volksstimmefest, Bericht der Revolutionär-Kommunistischen Organisation BEFREIUNG zum Volksstimmefest 2016, 05.09.2016, https://www.rkob.net/wer-wir-sind-1/rkob-aktiv-bei/bericht-vs-fest-2016/
(4) See on this e.g. RKOB: Austria: Right-Wing Party Opens Parliamentary Inquiry against the RCIT Section. Biggest Opposition Party smears the Trotskyists for alleged “Left-Wing Extremism”, “Antisemitism” and “Radical Islamism” and asks the Federal Ministry of the Interior to officially investigate them, 29.01.2017, https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/parliamentary-inquiry-against-rcit-section/ (This article contains in the footnotes many links to other attacks by pro-Zionist forces or the state against our comrades.)