The following is an analysis of Nazi anti-zionism. It looks at the transformation of antisemitic propaganda in the late 1940s, and observes the transition to an explicit language of anti-zionism. The multiple reasons for this shift are discussed, as well as the consequences. The analysis provides important historical material for thinking about the relationship between antisemitism and anti-zionism. It is from Michael Berkowitz’s book, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality, from the chapter “Re-Presenting Zionism as the Apex of Global Conspiracy.”
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In the latest issue of Upping the Anti journal, two articles were published on the question, “How should Left groups relate to non-Left anti-Imperialist movements?”
The first article, “Challenges to Capitalism, Challenges for the Left: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Three Way Fight,” Michael Staudenmaier introduces the “three way fight” analysis, as an attempt to go beyond the bi-polar worldview that the author finds both widespread on the Left and an unsatisfactory analytical framework. As a response, the journal published the article “Islam and the Left: A Reply to Staudenmaier” by Rami El-Amine of Left Turn magazine.
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In the ongoing debate about the relationship of antisemitism to anti-zionism, historical case-studies can serve as useful material. The anti-zionist campaign in Poland, of 1967-1968, offers the ability to examine the relationship in detail. Below are links to some recent contributions on the topic.
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from the essay:
“There are other dictatorships in the world. But only in Iran are the fantasy-worlds of antisemitism and religious mission linked with technological megalomania and the physics of mass destruction.
“The specific danger presented by the Iranian nuclear option stems from the unique ideological atmosphere surrounding it – a mixture of Holocaust denial and weapons-grade uranium, of death-wish and missile research, of Shiite messianism and plutonium.
“We are dealing here with a phantasmagoric parallel universe in which the reality principle is constantly ignored: a universe from which the laws of reason have been excluded and all mental energy is harnessed for the cause of antisemitism.”
read the essay here
After my latest experience with antisemitism on the New York City Indymedia website — in which the first reply to an article I posted about the firebombing of the home of a member of the Jewish Agency on Brown University, was something like “so what?”, and the ones that followed were explicitly justifying the attack — I’ve decided to finally pen my very first blog entry here.
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The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) has published the first in its Working Paper Series, edited by the director of YIISA, Charles Small. It is a paper by David Hirsh, editor of Engage and lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Abstract
This paper aims to disentangle the difficult relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On one side, antisemitism appears as a pressing contemporary problem, intimately connected to an intensification of hostility to Israel. Opposing accounts downplay the fact of antisemitism and tend to treat the charge as an instrumental attempt to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. I address the central relationship both conceptually and through a number of empirical case studies which lie in the disputed territory between criticism and demonization. The paper focuses on current debates in the British public sphere and in particular on the campaign to boycott Israeli academia. Sociologically the paper seeks to develop a cosmopolitan framework to confront the methodological nationalism of both Zionism and anti-Zionism. It does not assume that exaggerated hostility to Israel is caused by underlying antisemitism but it explores the possibility that antisemitism may be an effect even of some antiracist forms of anti-Zionism.
Download the paper here.
Listen to David Hirsh discuss his paper here.
By Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is this month to be released as a book—for which authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are said to have received a $750,000 advance from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. On this occasion, we present again the critique we ran last year of the work as it appeared in Middle East Policy Journal, then the latest version. This time the writer, who used the pseudonym “William X,” reveals himself as WW4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg.
The lengthy essay entitled “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” first appeared in the London Review of Books in March 2006, against a backdrop of fast-escalating carnage in Iraq and renewed Israeli aggression in the Occupied Territories. It immediately sparked an outrage. Here a view long consigned to the left and right fringe—that the Israeli “tail wags the dog” of US foreign policy—was being voiced by thoroughly mainstream scholars. The authors were John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy. An expanded version was posted on the Working Paper website of the Kennedy School.
By the end of March, Harvard had announced it was removing its logo from the study. It also appended a harshly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it “does not necessarily” reflect the views of the university. The semi-retraction came after much protest from both the mainstream and Jewish press. Finally, the Kennedy School announced that Walt would step down as academic dean at the end of June, although he would stay on as a professor.
Yet a third version of “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” appears in the Fall 2006 issue of the journal Middle East Policy, this time with additional material addressing the criticisms. In the introduction, the authors state they are also preparing a detailed “Response to Our Critics,” adding that they have been “struck by how weak and ill-founded” many of the criticisms have been.
What Mearsheimer and Walt (hereafter M&W) refer to as “the lobby” is not only the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but a wider ideological complex of allied organizations, prominently including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), and the Israel on Campus Coalition
The controversy around the essay indicates how nearly all ideological struggle is narrowing to a clash of conservatisms. The opposition to M&W has come overwhelmingly from the Zionist right, which holds the upper hand in the Bush administration. M&W themselves subscribe to an American nationalist right position with overtones of xenophobia and (however much the charge has been abused) anti-Semitism. Ominously, even the anti-war “left” is increasingly lining up with the latter conservatism. There has been practically no effort to critique the essay from a position which is anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist, but also sensitive to anti-Semitism. The degree to which such perspectives have been sidelined is especially dangerous given how Israel replicates the historical cycles of Jewish scapegoating by serving as imperialism’s proxy.
What follows is an attempt to respond to “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” from a position which cuts slack neither for Israel’s real crimes, nor for US “foreign policy” (read: imperialism), nor for anti-Semitism, conscious or implicit.
Read the article here
Haaretz
By Benjamin Weinthal
The square in the former East Berlin named for Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish Jewish social revolutionary who was murdered by right-wing extremists in 1919, served as my introduction to the pro-Israel left in Germany. After moving to Berlin in 2002, I attended a May 1 demonstration at Rosa Luxemburg Square. There among maybe a thousand union members and other left-wing activists, I found myself pleasantly ambushed by a group of a dozen or more young people waving massive Israeli flags and buzzing around the demonstrators. This bizarre scene was a cause of cognitive dissonance: Was it possible for there to be left-wing, non-Jewish Germans who were also militant supporters of Israel?
The answer, apparently, is yes, as an astonishing thing has happened in the leftist political and intellectual culture of Germany. Though the left here, as in the rest of Western Europe, continues to be overwhelmingly anti-Israel, one can now point to a slice of the German left that identifies itself as pro-Israel and is creating a flourishing anti-anti-Zionist leftist culture.
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Antifa groups from Germany and Austria have just published a pamphlet about antisemitism and anti-zionism. It includes basic texts, including critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “Theses on Antisemitism”; two texts by Moishe Postone, one on Nazi antisemitism, the other on contemporary forms of anti-capitalism; and a text on anti-Zionism. The pamphlet is downloadable from their website. More information below.
Why your revolution is no liberation!
With this reader, we want to take a stand against the currently predominating analyses, of the anti-globalisation movement, which, articulating themselves as in the broadest sense left-wing and anticapitalist, constantly boisterously trumpet their opinion, that another world was possible. We have serious doubts that this “other” world, was going to be of a better constitution than the current one. This anti-globalisation movement is of course not at all marginalised, but is enjoying broad sympathy, which reaches from the “bourgeois left” right to the so-called centre of society and which is even shared by Neo-Nazis
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