Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists.
Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalized.
But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe.
It is in our power to stop it, because we are the ones empowering it.
We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this tragedy, the Balfour Declaration.
The British role in Palestine was a case of ‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution 181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved in the late nineteenth century.
Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists.
Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way to get rid of Jews.
The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that ‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult.
They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land.
They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.
They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial superiority was seductive.
As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.