By Yossi Schwartz (Member of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency [RCIT] and Central-Israel Branch of Balad), 20.11.2016, http://the-isleague.com/
As soon as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu learned of the victory of Donald Trump, he telephoned, tweeted, issued a statement and posted a video celebrating the victory, calling Trump “a true friend of Israel.” Trump, on his part, invited Netanyahu to the U.S. to meet “at the first opportunity.“
Netanyahu celebrated the victory of Trump as well as other leaders of the most reactionary forces in the US and the world. Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke greeted Trump for his historical victory and so did Marine La Pen in France. She said that Trump’s victory is good news for France. Her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, also congratulated Trump, “Today the United States, tomorrow France,” he tweeted. He is known among other things for repeatedly stating his view that the Nazi gas chambers of World War II were a mere “detail” of history. (1)
Other Fascists like Freedom Party leader, Geert Wilders, of the Netherlands and Golden Dawn Party spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, of Greece joined the cheers. Vladimir Putin who helps Syrian President Assad to butcher the Syrian people was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Mr. Trump on his victory. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was another authoritarian world leader to welcome Trump’s presidency as he sees Trump’s victory as a sign of support for his repressive regime that has killed and jailed many thousands of people suspected of belonging or supporting the Muslim Brotherhood or leftist democratic forces.
A Boost to Zionist Theft of Palestinian Land
The right wing Zionist parties that make up the Israeli government see the victory of Trump as a boost to their theft of Palestinian land and an end to the pressure to come to an agreement with the Palestinian Authority. It is time to expand the settlements in the entire West Bank, they say.
“It’s unquestionably a new era. Now is the time to advance plans, to resume building and move ahead,” Moti Yogev (Habayit Hayehudi) said during a celebratory meeting in the Knesset.” (2)
Habayit Hayehudi chairman and minister of education, Naftali Bennett, congratulated the president-elect and said, “Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause. This is the position of the President-elect, as written in his platform, and it should be our policy, plain and simple. … The era of a Palestinian state is over.” (3)
It was not a great surprise that the so called opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, head of the Zionist Union party, congratulated Trump in a Facebook post.
“American democracy today elected a leader who surprised the pundits, and showed that we are in an era of change and new direction. You did the unexpected, against all odds,” Herzog wrote.
“I am convinced that the security and economic alliance between Israel, and our strongest ally the United States, will continue to strengthen under your presidency.” (4)
According to the Prime Minster Office press release “Merav Michaeli, a Knesset member also with Zionist Union, lamented Trump’s win, calling it a “sad day” when America elected a man who “carried a flag of hatred” toward the women and the vulnerable. Zehava Galon, the chief of the far left Meretz party, echoed Michaeli’s lament, but said she believed that “democracy will survive the American presidency of Donald Trump.” (5)
The Communist Party and its electoral front Hadash, that during the elections supported the Democratic imperialist party, now, after the victory of Trump, wrote on November 10th that the victory of Trump express the crisis of capitalism and of American imperialism. The right wing in the US and Europe is getting stronger. Trump’s victory expresses the anger and frustration of the weak and even the middle class layers from the decay of the system. Clinton did not offer any political alternative in the internal relationships and expressed the continuation of the destructive imperialist interest in the region. Sanders, represented a social democratic line, but the blocking of this line left the voters with two bad alternatives and they voted for Trump. (6)
While we can agree with this conclusion, even though Sanders represented a liberal line, not a social democratic one, the question is why Hadash and the CPI during the election campaign called to vote Clinton when it seemed that she is going to win the election rather than fight for the formation of a Workers’ Party based on the unions and especially black and other minority workers in total opposition to both parties of the class enemy.
Trump’s Anti-Semitism
While the Zionist right and left mainstream parties welcome Trump’s victory, the American Jews, most of them liberals, are terrified. During Trump’s campaign anti-Muslim as well as Anti-Jewish signs were waved under his nose in Cincinnati. Trump said that he did not see them. Leaflets containing caricatures of George Soros, Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson as the three wise monkeys were distributed at a press conference in Chicago, but he did not see them. “How many of you are Jews“, he asked the reporters. “Tell me because we can always pull down your pants and see for ourselves“, he said. (7)
The ultra Orthodox who supported Trump were driven with curses and shoves out from a meeting in Albany. In a meeting in El Paso he said that “Bloooomental and Schoooooomer” were ganging up on Trump to prevent America being great again “because the New York establishment wants to suck us dry. The Jews don’t give me money because they know I can’t be bought. So they’re doing everything they can to destroy me. We’ll see how to deal with this thing once I’m in office, but I promise you, it won’t be pleasant“. (8)
Collaboration of Zionism with Anti-Semites in History
This will not be the first time in history that the Anti-Semites support the Zionists and the Zionists support the Anti-Semites. Theodor Herzl, wrote in his 1895 diary: “In Paris… I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to “combat” anti-Semitism.” He also wrote “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not wish to bring about the impoverishment of the countries that we leave. At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and make them despicable as stooges of the Jews. Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we have emigrated. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies“. (9)
Balfour like his Prime Minister, Lloyd George, were Anti-Semites. Lloyd George once described his colleague Herbert Samuel as “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.” Balfour had been moved to tears by British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s recital of the ills done to the Jewish people. Nevertheless, he told Weizmann that he shared the “anti-Semitic postulates” of the virulent Cosima Wagner, who would become one of the first patrons of Adolf Hitler. In fact, the sole Jewish member of Lloyd George’s government, Edwin Montagu, strongly opposed the Balfour Declaration because he thought it would encourage anti-Semites throughout the world to expel Jews from their countries. “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto,” he warned. (10)
In the 1930s the Labor Zionists made the deal known as “The Transfer” with the Third Reich. The Nazis allowed some rich Jews to be transported to Palestine with their 30 Million dollars. Large parts of it were in the form of German products and the Zionists were selling Nazi products in the Middle East.
For this reason the Zionists sabotages the Anti-Nazi-Boycott. Today the Zionists are forced to admit that indeed the Zionist and the Nazi collaborated economically and politically but they try to find excuses for it. For example we can read in Encyclopedia Judaica under the entry “Haavara”:
“HAAVARA, a company for the transfer of Jewish property from Nazi Germany to Palestine. The Trust and Transfer Office Haavara Ltd., was established in Tel Aviv, following an agreement with the German government in August 1933, to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine by allowing the transfer of their capital in the form of German export goods. The Haavara Agreement is an instance where the question of Jewish rights, Zionist needs and individual rescue were in deep tension. Jewish organizations outside of Germany had declared a boycott against German goods and hoped to delegitimate the Nazi regime. The Zionists saw this agreement as a way of attracting Jews to Palestine and thus rescuing them from the Nazi universe even if that meant cooperation with Hitler. For a time the Nazi program of making Germany Judenrein and the Zionist policy of seeking olim coincided.” (11)
Yet what this apologetics piece still hides is the fact that because of this agreement the Zionists sabotage the international boycott of Nazi Germany. Alison Weir wrote on this question in the context of the attack of the Anti-Defamation-League on a flyer produced by International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The flyer was part of Auschwitz survivor speaking tour about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Called “Never Again For Anyone,” it was sponsored by a diverse array of eight national organizations and nine local ones, secular, Jewish and Muslim. Weir wrote:
“The flier’s statements are accurate. There is detailed evidence that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that Zionists sabotaged anti-Nazi boycotts, and that Zionists interfered with efforts to rescue victims of Nazi oppression. When facts first emerged in the 1950s about Zionist-Nazi collusion, it caused considerable scandal in Israel and led to the fall of the Israeli government of the time. A number of books are dedicated to this subject and it is discussed in numerous others, almost all by Jewish and/or Israeli authors. The topic inspired novels by well-known Israeli writers Amos Elon and Neil Gordon, was the subject of a 1987 British play, and was portrayed in a 1994 Israeli docudrama. Popular American playwright and fervent Zionist Ben Hecht wrote the first book on the subject, “Perfidy,” relating the history of a Hungarian Zionist leader who arranged for his family and several hundred prominent Jews to escape while facilitating the movement of the rest of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1960 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil,” writes: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”
In “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” (containing an afterword by ADL head Abe Foxman), pro-Israel writer Edwin Black reports that in 1933 Zionist leaders concluded a secret pact with the Third Reich that transferred 60,000 Jews and $100,000 to Palestine, Zionists promising in return that they would halt the worldwide boycott “that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.”
Author-researcher Lenni Brenner wrote of Zionist-Nazi collusion in “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” of which the London Times stated: “Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.” Brenner’s second book on the topic, “51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,” includes a 1940 letter from underground Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Stern proposing that Jewish militias would fight on Germany’s side in exchange for Nazi help in creating an “historic Jewish state.”
In “What Price Israel,” American Council for Judaism member Alfred Lilienthal describes FDR’s efforts to set up a program to rescue refugees, only to find Zionists sabotaging it. Roosevelt explained: “The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place this poor Jew can go.’”
In “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev quotes Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.” Segev writes that Ben-Gurion worried that ‘the human conscience’ might cause various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany and saw this as a threat, warning: ‘Zionism is in danger.’” (12)
The Israeli state had very close relations with the Argentinean Junta that killed Jews and sold it weapons. During the military rule of Pinochet in Chile, Israel had very close relations to the butcher who killed leftist Jews.
Reactionary politicians have differentiated many times between the “good Jews” – the Zionists – and the bad Jews – the progressive and revolutionary Jews. In 1920 Churchill wrote the Jews are divided into three groups: The national Jews who support the governments, the Zionists who want to have their own national project and the International Jews like Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky. The first two are good and the third one very destructive. (13)
Fighting both against Zionism and Anti-Semitism!
The Zionists and the non-Jewish reactionaries have a common ground. The Anti-Semites want to drive the Jews out of the countries they have lived in for centuries and the Zionists want to gain from it by recruiting some of these Jews to serve in the army and settle in the 1967 occupied lands. For the Zionist a strong Anti-Semite wave in the USA will be seen as a blessing.
Thus the fight in the US against the wave of racism that Trump’s victory is releasing will include the fight against Anti-Semitism and the Zionist state. In the 1950s and the 1960s many Jews participated in the anti racist struggle led by the black movement in the US. This alliance was broken after the 1967 war. This alliance is likely to be formed again and with other minorities. To be successful this struggle must be led by the working class and in particular the black working and on a program that will lead to the liberation of the working class and the masses of the poor and the oppressed from destructive capitalism. It was Lenin who said: “For Humanity to survive imperialism must die“.
Footnotes
(1) Eric Feferberg: National Front President and European MP Marine Le Pen speaks during a convention on November 8, 2016 in Paris, AFP, http://www.france24.com/en/20161109-france-far-right-chief-marine-le-pen-congratulates-trump
(2) Jonathan Lis: Right-wing Israeli Lawmakers Celebrate Trump’s Victory: ‘Time to Push Settlements’ Members of the Knesset’s Land of Israel Caucus exulted over an anticipated U.S. policy shift over the Palestinians and the West Bank, Haaretz, 09.11.2016, http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.752213
(3) ibid
(4) Marcy Oster: Israeli politicians congratulate Trump on victory Jewish Light, November 9, 2016, http://www.stljewishlight.com/news/world/article_49b64821-9394-5629-9f8d-09795c3525d0.html
(5) Naomi Zeveloff: Benjamin Nethnayahu Leads Israel Salute to Donald Trump After White Hose Win, 9 November 2016, http://forward.com/news/israel/353859/benjamin-netanyahu-leads-israeli-salute-to-donald-trump-after-white-house-w/
(6) See https://he-il.facebook.com/hadash.org.il/10/11/2016
(7) Chemi Shalev: How Donald Trump Won the U.S. Elections, Scared the Jews and Saved Israel. A nightmarish fantasy: After the 2016 ‘War of the Races,’ thousands of liberal Jews fled to the one place that would accept them, and changed it forever, Haaretz, Nov 09, 2016 http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.707374
(8) ibid
(9) The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. 1, edited by Raphael Patai; translated by Harry Zohn, Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, New York 1960, pp. 83-84
(10) Jonathan Schneer: How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel, September 8, 2010, Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/09/08/how-anti-semitism-helped-create-israel-2/
(11) Encyclopedia Judaica: Haavara, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0008_0_08075.html
(12) Alison Weir: Denying Nazi-Zionist Collusion, Counter Punch, March 4, 2011, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/04/denying-nazi-zionist-collusion/
(13) Winston S. Churchill: Zionism versus Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People, http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html