zionist-holocaust cult
To the editor:
Now that the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is in full swing, some background reading is a bit overdue. We might start with Michael Goldberg, Why Should Jews Survive?, which argues that the story of Exodus has been displaced as the master story of Judaism by what he calls "the Holocaust cult." His principal argument is that the obsession with disaster is a menace to Jewish survival simply because it cannot sustain a belief in the essential worth of Judaism. I found precious little to disagree with in this book, except that I would call it "the Zionist/ Holocaust cult."
What has put me off about Zionism over the years is not anything Yassir Arafat or any other anti-Zionist has said. It is, rather, the total monomania I get from the Zionists themselves, whether in person, or in print, such as the "FLAME" (Facts and Logic About the Mid East) ads in various magazines.
Lately I have been reading about a peculiar Zionist fanaticism that has indeed endangered Jewish survival. Over the past twenty years or so we have seen how dangerous cults can be, but this one goes back much further and has endangered far more than its own members.
In Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, a magnificently researched volume begun here in Chicago about a Zionist deal with the Nazis, there is a brief discussion of Walter Nordau's ideas of "catastrophic Zionism." By the 1920's the co-founder of Zionism had concluded that Zion would not come about until some disaster had befallen the Jewish people. In Black's overview of Zionist history, Herzl had mobilized Zionism with notions of unavoidable Jewish-Gentile antagonism. He also anticipated Zionism's big opportunity coming with renewed persecution.
In other volumes we see that early Zionists ran into a lot of comfortable, established Jews who had no intention of starting anew in some wilderness. At Zionist Congresses in the 1930's David Ben-Gurion said he would prefer saving half the Jewish children in Palestine to saving all of them in England, that rescue efforts would "strike Zionism off the world agenda." In the 1940's there was Zionist opposition to rescue missions, on grounds that after the war the world would be distributed to those who had shed blood. (Lenny Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators; Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse).
In the 1950's Ben Hecht wrote Perfidy, on the betrayal of Hungarian Jews in the name of the Zionist cause. Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism, has a chapter on Zionist objections to rescue. It also quotes Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, as saying at a Zionist Congress that only the young Jews will survive, that the old ones are economic and moral dust in a cruel world.
Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, is certainly not the most charming book I have ever read. If one can read around rather a virulent distaste for things Jewish, however, one can see death rates running from 2.8% to 10% a month at Auschwitz, gassings or no gassings, and a crematoria capacity capable of cremating the camp population two and a half to five times a year. Butz also points out that the camp was a major producer of synthetic oil and rubber. In other words, the camp was an entirely legitimate military target, quite aside from any humanitarian concerns. Why wasn't it bombed?
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel, shows at some length that Zionism was founded on extremely derogatory notions of Jewish life in the Diaspora, as does Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, The Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism. Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionism, says, from the standpoint of an Israeli pioneer, "Zionist literature, taught to every Jewish child in Palestine, depicted Jewish life in eastern Europe as despicable, the whole tradition and folk lore of the ghetto as cowardly, crooked, parasitical..."
I am not Jewish myself, but after all the abuse Maxwell St. has taken over the years, I find that personally offensive. Maxwell St., of course, is Chicago's original Jewish neighborhood and the world's best poverty program, an extension of eastern European Jewish life. Having spent the past ten years trying to save, then to restore Maxwell St., I find that sort of thing does get a bit too close to home.
Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History, documents "Jewish Restoration," the notion by various western luminaries of sending the Jews back to Palestine, going back some 300 years before Herzl. No wonder, there has been so much collaboration between Zionists and the various pogromists and fascists and genocidists of the world, as most of the above works document.
Is an "anti-Semite" anyone who opposes Zionism? Then such prominent Jews as Nahum Goldman, I.F. Stone, and Phillip Klutznick are traitors for deviating from the Zionist party line, according to Paul Findley, They Dared to Speak Out, some 330 pages on the Zionists sandbagging critics. So who is "anti-Semitic" anyway? Zionism has been a disaster for Jews and Arabs both, the two major Semitic peoples.
"The Zionist/Holocaust cult" is also a diversion from, almost a denial of, those evils of Nazism short of gassings, which were plenty bad enough but more likely to be repeated. All the traumaturgy aside, it is also a diversion from the similar evils committed by the State of Israel.
William F. Wendt, Jr.
Now that the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is in full swing, some background reading is a bit overdue. We might start with Michael Goldberg, Why Should Jews Survive?, which argues that the story of Exodus has been displaced as the master story of Judaism by what he calls "the Holocaust cult." His principal argument is that the obsession with disaster is a menace to Jewish survival simply because it cannot sustain a belief in the essential worth of Judaism. I found precious little to disagree with in this book, except that I would call it "the Zionist/ Holocaust cult."
What has put me off about Zionism over the years is not anything Yassir Arafat or any other anti-Zionist has said. It is, rather, the total monomania I get from the Zionists themselves, whether in person, or in print, such as the "FLAME" (Facts and Logic About the Mid East) ads in various magazines.
Lately I have been reading about a peculiar Zionist fanaticism that has indeed endangered Jewish survival. Over the past twenty years or so we have seen how dangerous cults can be, but this one goes back much further and has endangered far more than its own members.
In Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, a magnificently researched volume begun here in Chicago about a Zionist deal with the Nazis, there is a brief discussion of Walter Nordau's ideas of "catastrophic Zionism." By the 1920's the co-founder of Zionism had concluded that Zion would not come about until some disaster had befallen the Jewish people. In Black's overview of Zionist history, Herzl had mobilized Zionism with notions of unavoidable Jewish-Gentile antagonism. He also anticipated Zionism's big opportunity coming with renewed persecution.
In other volumes we see that early Zionists ran into a lot of comfortable, established Jews who had no intention of starting anew in some wilderness. At Zionist Congresses in the 1930's David Ben-Gurion said he would prefer saving half the Jewish children in Palestine to saving all of them in England, that rescue efforts would "strike Zionism off the world agenda." In the 1940's there was Zionist opposition to rescue missions, on grounds that after the war the world would be distributed to those who had shed blood. (Lenny Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators; Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse).
In the 1950's Ben Hecht wrote Perfidy, on the betrayal of Hungarian Jews in the name of the Zionist cause. Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism, has a chapter on Zionist objections to rescue. It also quotes Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, as saying at a Zionist Congress that only the young Jews will survive, that the old ones are economic and moral dust in a cruel world.
Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, is certainly not the most charming book I have ever read. If one can read around rather a virulent distaste for things Jewish, however, one can see death rates running from 2.8% to 10% a month at Auschwitz, gassings or no gassings, and a crematoria capacity capable of cremating the camp population two and a half to five times a year. Butz also points out that the camp was a major producer of synthetic oil and rubber. In other words, the camp was an entirely legitimate military target, quite aside from any humanitarian concerns. Why wasn't it bombed?
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel, shows at some length that Zionism was founded on extremely derogatory notions of Jewish life in the Diaspora, as does Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, The Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism. Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionism, says, from the standpoint of an Israeli pioneer, "Zionist literature, taught to every Jewish child in Palestine, depicted Jewish life in eastern Europe as despicable, the whole tradition and folk lore of the ghetto as cowardly, crooked, parasitical..."
I am not Jewish myself, but after all the abuse Maxwell St. has taken over the years, I find that personally offensive. Maxwell St., of course, is Chicago's original Jewish neighborhood and the world's best poverty program, an extension of eastern European Jewish life. Having spent the past ten years trying to save, then to restore Maxwell St., I find that sort of thing does get a bit too close to home.
Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History, documents "Jewish Restoration," the notion by various western luminaries of sending the Jews back to Palestine, going back some 300 years before Herzl. No wonder, there has been so much collaboration between Zionists and the various pogromists and fascists and genocidists of the world, as most of the above works document.
Is an "anti-Semite" anyone who opposes Zionism? Then such prominent Jews as Nahum Goldman, I.F. Stone, and Phillip Klutznick are traitors for deviating from the Zionist party line, according to Paul Findley, They Dared to Speak Out, some 330 pages on the Zionists sandbagging critics. So who is "anti-Semitic" anyway? Zionism has been a disaster for Jews and Arabs both, the two major Semitic peoples.
"The Zionist/Holocaust cult" is also a diversion from, almost a denial of, those evils of Nazism short of gassings, which were plenty bad enough but more likely to be repeated. All the traumaturgy aside, it is also a diversion from the similar evils committed by the State of Israel.
William F. Wendt, Jr.
posted by bcbe at 5:16 PM
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