Zionism and anti semitism
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Trump is anti-Mexican They should pass a resolution against that
“Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.” – Netanyahu.
Incredible. Completely shameless. Imagine a Prime Minister of Northern Ireland saying that Northern Ireland was a state for the Protestant people only. I think one did say something similar in the 1930s but didn’t go that far. He was denounced as a sectarian.
Apparently Nutty Yahoo’s statement has been criticised, by Wonder Woman and the President of Israel:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gal-gadot-hits-out-netanyahu-over-jewish-people-comment-n981636
There’s hope yet.
Chris Hedges on the Israeli lobby in the USA
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/11/israels-stranglehold-american-politics
“…AIPAC, while it presents itself as an impartial supporter of Israel, has long been an arm of the Israeli right. It vehemently opposed the Oslo Accord and the peace process with the Palestinians engineered by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It poured money and resources into the 1992 Israeli election campaign to back Rabin’s political opponents in the Likud party. Rabin did not invite the leaders of the Israel lobby to his inauguration and, according to an aide in his office, referred to the leaders of the Israel lobby as “scumbags.” He repeatedly denounced the lobby as an impediment to Israel’s security and democracy.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz characterized Rabin’s remarks to American Jewish leaders during a visit to the United States as “brutal.” “You have hurt Israel,” the newspaper quoted Rabin as saying. “I will not allow you to conduct my dealings with the [U.S.] administration.”
Washington Jewish Week reported that Rabin told the AIPAC leadership, “You failed at everything. You waged lost battles. … You caused damage to Israel. … You’re too negative. … You create too much antagonism.”
The Israel lobby, after Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by a right-wing Jewish fanatic and the 1996 electoral victory by Likud under the leadership of Netanyahu, returned to the good graces of the Israeli government….”To oppose the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is now to be considered as anti-Semitic.
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, warned: “that penalising the settlements was “an expression of modern antisemitism”.
The United Nations postponed last week for the third time the publication of a blacklist of Israeli and international firms that profit directly from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The international body had come under enormous pressure to keep the database under wraps after lobbying behind the scenes from Israel, the United States and many of the 200-plus companies that were about to be named.
For many years they have been holding the United Nations by the balls and cheating peoples with the concept of anti semitism by transforming a language into a race or ethnic group by using a book of mythology known as the Bible
Weekly Worker on Marx’s “anti-Semitism”
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1242/marx-and-jewish-emancipation/
The media and Israel and Palestine – from the horses mouth
The Western media narrative has been dominated by Israel during the entire 70-year conflict, according to Ilan Baruch, the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa.
“Israel was brilliantly successful in offering a narrative to the western hemisphere that was embraced with little or no objective judgement,” said Baruch, who resigned from the foreign service in 2011 because he felt he could no longer represent the Israeli government’s policies…critics of Israeli government policy find themselves accused of anti-Jewish racism, Baruch, the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, said the debate needed to move past conflating these two notions.
“Even criticising Zionism as the inspirational movement that created Israel is not anti-Semitism,” he said. “[The anti-Semitism charge] is just a ploy to pull down criticism of Israel.”The Commission of Inquiry said Israel should investigate the shooting of more than 6,000 people, far beyond the criminal inquiries it has announced into 11 killings.
“The most important thing for the government of Israel is to review the rules of engagement immediately and to ensure that the rules of engagement are according to accepted international law standards,” the commission’s chairman Santiago Canton told the Human Rights Council.U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell told the crowd of Israel supporters gathered outside the UN in Geneva.
“Applying one standard to the state of Israel and not applying the same standard to others is anti-Semitic,” he said.In your untiring and commendable daily perusal of alternative news sites, do not neglect (if you do) the following:(- where you yesterday would have seen this great little history —2) The US (market-)libertarian site https://www.antiwar.com .3) https://www.wsws.org (where, despite all, there is now and then something worth reading.)(Not necessarily just in connection with the zionism-topic of course.)Says Conrad in that article:
‘Put aside Marx’s own Jewishness, a religiously pious mother and rabbinical lineage: a good case can be made for his communism being connected, consciously or otherwise, with messianic Old Testament prophets, such as Amos, Micah and Habakkuk.18 Possibly this came through his personal acquaintance with the proto-Zionist Moses Hess (1812-72), who likewise condemned the “Judeo-Christian huckster world”; a line of thought that surely came via Spinoza, Goethe and Hegel. ‘
I think any anti-semite would be delighted to read that.
The fact of the matter is that Marx got his initial communism from Frenchmen, not from Hess — and certainly not from the OT. And Hess (from whom Engels indeed is said to have ‘learned his communism’) at that time was called Moritz, not Moses; he was not yet a Jewish nationalist (proto-zionist or otherwise) — that happened later on, the 60’s.
As you say, that statement of Conrad’s is ridiculous for the reasons you give. He cites Erich Fromm. I checked this and Fromm was not talking about Marx in particular but about the idea of socialism in general. What he wrote was:
Marxist and other forms of socialism are the heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance Utopianism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment.
Maybe, but I would have thought that, in Marx’s case, the last was what influenced him.
Marx’s Jewish Question is a criticism of the state and money and, as Conrad points out, does advocate giving full political rights to Jews (as those who practised Judaism). Because it was an early work, dating from the same year (1843/4) that he became a socialist, Marx still identified capitalism with money; which would be why he identified Judaism as the religion of capitalism. But capitalism is not about money-lending and “huckstering”. It’s about production for profit and capital accumulation. In which case it is Protestantism (Calvinism rather than the semi-Protestantism, or semi-Catholicism, of the Church of England), because it preached abstinence and so saving rather than spending money earned from working, that fills better the role of the religion of capitalism. I’m not sure either that Judaism is a religion of money. It’s a tribal religion based on adherence to rituals. To that extent Marx’s criticism of Judaism was unfair.
I think Marx would have been influenced by Moritz Hess (as he then was) who, the following year, published an article advocating communism as a moneyless society
Here’s an interesting article for those involved in this thread;
Re the ‘unknown’ number of Congress members and federal employees who have dual citizenship – US and Israel and its various implications.
Last para reads:Since the days of the <i>Afriyum </i>decision, the potential for betrayal and conflicts of interest have intensified dramatically for Members of Congress and Federal employees and those holding national security clearances given the unparalleled financial and political support that the US provides to Israel. In addition, the 2018 adoption by the Knesset of the <i>Basic Law</i> which establishes that Israel is now specifically a Jewish nation raises First Amendment issues regarding the establishment clause as it prohibits state-sponsored religion.
Janet, I had mixed thoughts when I read this.
The idea of divided national loyalties may be an issue for those who offer allegiance to their place of birth or upbringing and only to that land. Thus the US Supreme Court defines us to one nationality and if we dare to choose another, it legally exiles us.
But I do consider myself a citizen of the world despite holding a passport that says otherwise and what happens to my fellow-workers in whatever region is as equally my concern. This is class solidarity that extends beyond borders. It legitimises my “foreign” interventionism in another country’s internal politics or its treatment of another country’s people.
Socialism is all about, to adopt a biblical expression, being our brothers’ keepers. (I think Debs said that somewhere), accepting social responsibilities.
When socialists are asked about the migration, we condemn closed frontiers and agree with open borders (even if we know capitalism will never permit no controls, hence my need to hang on to this passport of mine).
So, in a way, despite the strict religious limitations to it, Israel saying any Jew from anywhere is welcome is positive. What is negative is then declaring those who are non-Jewish, all persona non grata.
When Israel’s Netanyahu tells French Jews to come home, that is okay, but for a gentile to tell the same French Jews to go home to Israel, that is anti-Semitic. Strange that, isn’t it?
It is equally not for Netanyahu or anybody else to tell someone where his or her home is.
I’m daily asked where I am from and when I name the town I presently reside in, it is simply not acknowledged as a correct answer.
Being in a similar situation yourself, Janet, i’m sure you too find yourself with so-called “dual” loyalties but like myself being a world socialist we recognise we all share a common humanity.
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