Zionism and Judaism – two sides of the same coin?

Critics of Zionism and its excesses are usually keen to stress that their criticism is not aimed at Judaism as a religion but at Zionism as a racist and supremacist political movement. This claim of the two being diametrically opposed to each other is eloquently expressed by Hajo Meyer in a video interview with David Zlutnick, quoted approvingly at electronic intifada[1]: “Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other. Because Judaism is universal and humane, and Zionism is exactly the opposite. It is very narrow, very nationalistic, racist, colonialist, and all this. There is no ‘National Judaism’. There is Zionism and there is Judaism, and they are completely different.”

However, this distinction is not always as clear-cut as its supporters would like to assert. Rather, Zionism is a product of Judaism and would not exist without it. In some ways, their relationship is like that of a worn-out marriage in which the partners are no longer particularly attracted to each other, yet do not wish to divorce due to the benefits of retaining the union. Or, maybe more aptly, Zionism is the prodigal son of Judaism who often embarrasses his parents, yet they cannot get themselves to disown him.

For sure, there are critics of Zionism within Judaism. Amongst them Neturei Karta, a Hassidic Jewish movement who take issue, however, not with the idea of Zion or Jerusalem as the centre of the world but with the premature timing of the Zionist project: “the Torah forbids us to end the exile and establish a state and army until the Holy One, blessed He, in His Glory and Essence will redeem us.”[2] Of the many others who think the Zionist project “unwise”, Edward Corrigan gives a long list.[3] But altogether there are very few Jews outspoken enough to expose the bigotry of the Zionist project publicly, such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Israel Shahak or Israel Shamir, and on the whole they are disliked and ostracised by their fellow Jews due to their apparent lack of family loyalty.

In many ways, Zionism is a natural extension of Judaism, restoring to the wandering Jews the notion of a homeland coupled with political influence. Its bold supremacism mirrors the ordinary Jewish elitism derived from a self-perception as the Chosen People. The Talmud as the authoritative Jewish interpretation of scripture abounds in differentiation between Jews and Gentiles, with the former being given clear preference over the latter. A bizarre aberration of this attitude occurs when secular Zionists want to claim God’s special favours whilst at the same time seeing no need to believe in Him or act upon His commandments.

When Jews speak out against injustices visited upon non-Jews in Palestine, they frequently don’t do so because of a belief that Palestinians should have the same human rights as Israeli Jews – hardly any of them supports a single-state solution with equal rights for everyone –, but because they sense that the unbridled aggressive arrogance of the protagonists of Zionism will damage their overall reputation and standing in a world where Jews still remain a minority in many places and depend on the good-will of their majority host communities. They are also worried about the moral fall-out regarding the future legitimacy of the Zionist state. In the words of Uri Avnery: “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.”[4] Naturally, whilst being a critic of Israeli military tactics, he opposes calls for a boycott of the country in response.[5]

Whilst the dream of Zion is as old as the diaspora and there were earlier attempts to exploit Jewish identification with the Holy Land for the benefit of British Imperial designs against the threat of continental progress under Napoleon, Theodor Herzl and Benjamin Disraeli are recognised as the founders of political Zionism as a distinct movement.[6] Herzl is also said to have been the original author of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”[7]. The Zionists aspirations for political power were not immediately shared widely amongst European Jews and their ideas of setting up an exclusive Jewish state were initially ridiculed and rejected, but gradually gained currency, not least due to waves of anti-Semitism purposefully promoted and aided by the Zionists.[8] In his “Diaries”, Herzl noted: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends and the anti-Semitic countries our allies”. And Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion went on record saying: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them to Israel, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.”[9], showing his open contempt for Jewish lives in furthering Zionist political ambitions.

Neither Herzl nor Disraeli, or any of the prominent Zionists of the founding years of the state of Israel, were defenders of the Judaism of the Torah. But that does not mean they weren’t proper Jews. Most gentiles do not realise that the God of the Bible is not the only God holding sway over Jews in their synagogues. During their Babylonian captivity, Jews also learned the dark arts of occult mysticism and magic which they developed into the Kabbalah, in which all reality emerges from Zion, and the God of their belief system is no other than the antagonist of the Biblical deity – Lucifer.[10] He is the free spirit who liberates man from the shackles imposed by God and the restrictions of a moral code, thus enabling man to become god-like himself through enlightenment. It is this other god in whose service Jews became prominently involved in freemasonry with its references to the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and in revolutionary movements as well as licentious movements to undermine public morality, such as the one preached by Sabbatai Zevi. And it is this aspect of Judaism, the racist elitism without further need for God and His commandments, which gave birth to political secular Zionism.

This mindset also accounts for Israel’s lack of restraint in suppressing actual and perceived opposition. The most recent assaults on Gaza were notable by their brutality with the full weight of a sophisticated and well equipped army having been brought down indiscriminately on a defenceless population. But they were no isolated occurrences as earlier massacres, such as Shabra and Shatila, testify. In these incidents we see the destructive combination of superiority complex and lack of moral constraint by which Zionism is so often characterised.

Whilst one might expect that Torah Jews, who may well be repulsed by such atrocities, would see reason not only to distance themselves from the worst of these crimes against humanity but outright disown their Kabbalistic brethren, this rarely happens, because Judaism is not merely seen as a religion but also as a race which they all share in spite of their differences in beliefs and practice. The chosen people thus are no longer chosen because of religious observance but because of the superiority of their bloodline. The accusation of Israel being a racist apartheid regime is therefore not merely polemic but supported by the very foundations of the state of Israel.

This multiple personality complex of Jewish identity lies at the heart of why such apparently disparate people continue to stick together in the face of criticism, however justified. It is this unity which does not permit us to separate Zionism and Judaism as distinct, albeit interrelated, systems. Amongst themselves, Jews may dispute the wisdom or otherwise of the Zionist project, but vis-à-vis the wider world, generally perceived as hostile, they are two sides of the same coin.

When we perceive the origins of Zionism in this deviant occult strand of Judaism, we also gain an understanding of such apparent contradictions as both Herzl’s and Hitler’s almost identical beliefs on racial purity and shared love for Wagner[11], the collusion between the Nazi and Zionist movements in the creation of anti-semitism and transfer of Jewish people from Europe to Palestine[12], and the hand of British foreign policy in recruiting both of these charismatic proponents of their respective racist ideologies from within the intellectual left-over of the collapsed and decadent Hapsburg empire in Vienna for the purpose of bringing about the new dawn of global domination by Britain in an age where steel and oil threatened the natural advantage of the hitherto unrivalled sea power. Zionism always has been and remains a very British god-child and a testimony to the influence of Sabbatean Judaism on the British ruling classes. This is perfectly epitomised in Blake’s hymn Jerusalem having almost become a rival national anthem for the United Kingdom.

Hence, in the metaphor of Zionism and Judaism as two sides of the same coin we find that the Zionist side of the coin has become the more recognisable one and the Judaic side has worn away to a large extent. Or, returning to the prodigal son similitude, the son has established himself firmly, and it no longer matters whether his parents disown him or not. No longer dependent on them, he now exerts his influence upon them.

In the course of history, Jews in the diaspora have allowed their religious identification as the people of the Torah to be eroded and replaced by a racial identification of the Jewish people. This racial perception of themselves strengthened the occult Kabbalistic elements within their ranks, for whom blood and racial purity have always been more important than scripture. Jews no longer represented a faith but became a nation, and, arguably, a nation needed a state. To the disappointment of nostalgics like Neturei Karta, this nation state could dispense with the need for a future messiah. All that mattered was the here and now.

Because of the indifference of Jews around the world to the abuses by those who claim to represent them, Zionism has grown out of control like a cancer which is not being reigned in by religious exponents of Judaism (nor by the Western powers who sponsored its growth). If Judaism really wants to be universal and humane and wants to be respected as different to its Zionist offshoot, then non-Zionist Jews must stop turning a blind eye and replace their complacent toleration of Israel’s excesses with a clear denunciation of Israel’s racism as having no place in their midst. This does not necessarily mean the need to call for Israel as a state and political entity having to be dismantled, but would require support for a single-state solution where each citizen, Jewish or not, has identical civil rights and duties. Obviously, this means the end of a purely Jewish state in reality and its transformation into an ordinary secular state with Jewish roots. Those who find this anathema support the myth of Jewish supremacy and, in spite of their protestations, can only be described as covert Zionists.

 [Originally published in "Blood and Shekels" edited by Troy Southgate, Black Front Press 2018]

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[1] http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2014/08/zionism-nothing-judaism-holocaust-survivor-dr-hajo-meyer/ accessed 03/05/2015

[2] http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/Zionism/opposition.cfm accessed 03/05/2015

[3] http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/jewish-critics-of-zionism-and-of-israels-treatment-of-the-palestinians/ accessed 2/05/2015

[4] http://www.rense.com/general84/divisions.htm accessed 03/05/2015

[5] http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2009/09/uri-avnery-against-the-israeli-boycott/ accessed 03/05/2015

[6] For an extensive expose of the British origins of Zionism see Mark Burdman, How Britain’s Biggest Racists and Financiers Created Zionism, https://archive.org/stream/HowBritainsBiggestRacistsAndFinanciersCreatedZionism-ByMarkBurdman/HowBritainsBiggestRacistsAndFinanciersCreatedZionism-ByMarkBurdman_djvu.txt accessed 3/05/2015

[7] David Pidcock, Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern, Mustaqim 1992

[8] Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press 2008; Joseph Massad, Zionism, anti-Semitism and colonialism http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212249122912381.html accessed 3/05/2015; Zionism is also responsible for destroying the mostly amicable relationships between Jewish and Arab communities in the Muslim world, in some documented cases even by orchestrating terror against Jews, such as the 1950 Baghdad bombing campaign designed to get Iraqi Jews to migrate to Israel, see “Jews in the Arab World” in http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/03/zionism-and-anti-semitism/#identifier_18_42824 accessed 4/05/2015

[9] Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism, Veritas Press 1988

[10] Livingstone & Bleher, Surrendering Islam, Mustaqim 2010

[11] Leah Garrett, A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz and the legacy of Der Tannhäuser, Purdue University Press 2011; http://thinkclassical.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/is-wagner-spiritual-father-of-zionism.html accessed 3/05/2015

[12] cf. Ben Hecht, Perfidy, 1961; reprinted by Milah Press, Jerusalem, in 1997