Israel is losing the allegiance of diaspora Jews who see it as a racist, semi-fascist, ethnocentric state, says a Jewish British activist.
Speaking with MUSLIMPRESS in an interview, Tony Greenstein said it is very encouraging to see the massive growth in support for Palestine in the West.
He noted that Jewish anti-Zionism in the West has grown in recent years.
“The protests against US support for Israel have been led by Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. By conflating Jews and Zionism, you merely strengthen Zionism and therefore Israel,” he added.
The following is the full transcript of the interview:
Since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza on October 7, the issue of differentiating between being a Jew and being a Zionist has become much more important. The same also goes for conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. What could you say about these issues?
Zionism was not the work of Jews. The first Zionists were Christian Evangelists—people like Lords Palmerston and Shaftesbury. The idea of a Jewish State was not a Jewish but a Christian imperialist idea. The statesman most associated with Zionism is Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration. Balfour was a committed anti-Semite who in 1905, as Prime Minister, introduced the Aliens Act designed to keep Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia out of Britain.
Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, described a conversation he had had with Balfour, who told him that he had met with Cosima Wagner, the widow of the composer, Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann ‘pointed out that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’
Zionism is a political not a religious movement. When the Zionist movement was first formed at the end of the 19th century its bitterest opponents were Jews. The only member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who wrote:
It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation
Zionism only became a majority force among Western Jews after the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. Before that, it was a minority everywhere. It is estimated that in 1933 just 2% of German Jews were Zionists.
Why is it important to distinguish between being a Jew and a Zionist? For a number of reasons:
- Since Zionism is not a Jewish phenomenon, by attacking Jews you will not be tackling the source of the problem. For example, in the United States, the most ardent Zionist supporters are not Jewish but Christian Evangelicals. Christians United for Israel, led by Pastor John Hagee, has over a million supporters. They are extremely influential in the Republican Party in particular. These Christian Zionists don’t support Israel because they love Jews. Many of them, for example Donald Trump, are both Zionists and anti-Semitic.
- In recent years, we have seen the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism in the West. The protests against US support for Israel have been led by Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. By conflating Jews and Zionism, you merely strengthen Zionism and therefore Israel.
As Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua remarked:
‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’
iii. To attack Jews as the source of support for Zionism misses the fact that Israel depends on the support of Western imperialism, in particular the United States. The US does not support Israel because it loves Jews but because Israel is a stable, settler base in the region. In the words of Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier and worth every penny. Or as Joe Biden said, if Israel did not exist, it would have to be created.
How do you see the growing support for Palestine as well as awakening to the truth of Israeli crimes against Palestinians in Western countries?
It is very encouraging to see the massive growth in support for Palestine in the West. Britain has seen a series of massive demonstrations culminating in a million-strong march two weeks ago. Today, I took part in one that was about 300,000-strong in London. The reactionary Conservative Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was sacked after trying and failing to get the police to ban the demonstration.
Could you elaborate on your own activism and the significance of such activities in raising awareness in the West?
I was brought up in an Orthodox religious Zionist family. However, I was also a socialist, and at a young age, I decided that Zionism was an exclusivist and racist ideology that saw non-Jews as inferior, Arabs in particular. I have devoted most of my life to campaigning against Zionism and for the Palestinians. When I broke from Zionism at the age of 16, there were very few Jewish anti-Zionists. These days there are thousands of anti-Zionist Jews and a great many organisations. Israel is losing the allegiance of diaspora Jews who see that it is a racist, semi-fascist, ethnocentric state that has been created.
Western countries, despite their claims to advocate human rights and a rules-based international order, have been supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. What’s your take on this?
The hypocrisy of the West is a well-known fact. Their concern with human rights depends on whether the country is friendly to or an enemy of the West. This is why the United States has maintained an embargo on Cuba for over half a century, allegedly on human rights grounds, whilst supporting and arming a variety of autocratic police states in Latin America from Pinochet’s Chile to Argentina under the military junta that ruled between 1976 and 1983.
We only have to look at Russia in Ukraine. The West supports the resistance of people against the Russian invasion but calls Palestinian fighters against Israel ‘terrorists’. The double standards are plain to see for all who are not blind. Human rights concerns in the West are driven by foreign policy interests, not ethical standards.
What’s your view on the Hannibal Directive, especially in light of the recent revelation that the Israeli military killed their own people on October 7?
The Hannibal Directive, which argues for massive force to prevent the capture of Israeli hostages, even if the hostage is killed in the process, was supposed to have been repealed in 2016 but clearly it wasn’t. It turns out that a large number of the Israelis killed on October 7 were not killed by Hamas or Palestinian fighters but by Israeli tanks and Apache helicopters. At the moment, the Israeli media is busy destroying evidence of these.
I have recently brought out a book, Zionism During the Holocaust, which deals in particular with the Zionist record during the Nazi extermination of the Jews and others.
