Open Letter to MPAC

Stop Pandering Jewish Racists, Extremists

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

On February 5, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee circulated the following announcement.

L.A. Muslim-Jewish Text Study Program Now Accepting Applications

February 05, 2009

NewGround, a project of Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the University of Southern California's Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement are accepting applications to its newly formed Muslim-Jewish Text Study Program.

The Text Study Program will use Islamic and Judaic religious texts to promote religious understanding, facilitate dialogue, and enhance participants' knowledg e of their own faith through context, comparison and discussion.

The program will be led by Jihad Turk (the Director of Religious Affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California, a Religious Director at USC, and a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the UCLA) and Reuven Firestone (professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and senior fellow at USC's Center for Religion & Civic Culture). NewGround co-directors Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi will also serve as program facilitators.

• Click here to download the text study application (Word Document)
• To request the application by email, please email: cmje@usc.edu
• All applicants are encouraged to apply by: February 13, 2009

For more information about the pro gram, please see either www.usc.edu/cmje or http://www.newgroundproject.org/.

The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement & NewGround Text Study Pilot Program is made possible by the support of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Now that American and Israeli Jews have revealed the true face of Zionist genocidalism in Gaza, fake dialogues in which Muslims (or Christians) get together with Jewish hypocrites to pretend to have a serious discussion while participants ignore ongoing and longstanding Jewish barbarism makes no sense whatsoever.

Today, non-Jews should only meet with Jewish groups to demand that Jews apply to themselves the same standard that they apply to everyone else.

In other words, just as Jews demand that non-Jews acknowledge, take responsibility for, and show remorse for the anti-Jewish crimes that have arisen from non-Jewish politics, Jews must likewise acknowledge, take responsibility for and show remorse for the anti-gentile crimes that have arisen from Jewish politics.

There really is no value in talking with Jews that do not admit that Zionism is ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism, that the State of Israel routinely engages in terrorism, and that the only just solution consist of the dismantlement of the Zionist state, the eradication of Zionism, trials for Jewish perpetrators of crimes against humanity, repatriation of the native population, and reconveyance of properties to their rightful owners.

Here is my open letter to the organizers of this latest silly Muslim-Jewish interfaith dialogue.

From: thorsprovoni@aol.com
To: communications@mpac.org; turk@islamctr.org; aziza@newgroundproject.org; mfenyvesi@newgroundproject.org
Sent: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 8:04 am
Subject: Re: L.A. Muslim-Jewish Text Study Program Now Accepting Applications

Hi,

I looked through the program for the LA Muslim-Jewish text study program.

It is quite intellectually dishonest because it does not address the transformation of traditional Jewish religion into a combination of ethnic narcissism, Holocaust obsession, and worship of the State of Israel on the basis of völkisch racist politics.

For the vast majority of Jews the texts under consideration are for the most part irrelevant.

A useful course would look at Central and Eastern European Jewish political nationalist texts and discuss the development of ethnic fundamentalist and ethnic monist ideas among German Jews and ethnic Ashkenazim.

The modern Jewish American consciousness has much in common with the German Nazi mentality of the 1930s, and in fact, the primary Zionist ideologist Max Nordau is at least as influential among German Nazis as he was among Zionists (ethnic Ashkenazi Nazis).

I know that Jewish racists and extremists generally consider it offensive to discuss Jewish Nazism, but when Zionist forces so casually slaughter non-Jewish women and children as happened during the latest IDF rampage in Gaza, we have to get past such Zionist mental colonization.

To believe that Jews of all people could not develop their own Nazi ideology comparable to German Nazism is itself a racist belief in Jewish ethical superiority to the rest of the human race.

Just as racist murderous genocidal Zionist Jewish invaders, interlopers, and thieves in Stolen and Occupied Palestine threaten the non-Jewish populations of the ME, Zionist Jewish power threatens American Muslims with at least marginalization and undermines the fabric of American society, politics and culture.

My document The Israel Lobby and American Society addresses both

• the danger of the Israel Lobby, which is the public face of the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland, and also
• the development of a Jewish power system that intimidates the entire human race.

It is a complete waste of time for Muslims to attempt to develop bridges with Jews,

• who fail to condemn Jewish racism and extremism categorically and
• who refuse to demand the abolition of the Zionist state along with the arrest, trial and punish of Zionist war criminals.
  

My organization, Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, can provide interfaith education for Muslims and non-Muslims wishing to join together against the greatest threat facing the USA and the human race today.

If you are interested, please send me an email.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

P.S. Here is an excerpt from my document on Issues and Questions in the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism.

The Medieval Anachronism:
יהודים, 'Iουδαϊοι, Iūdaei and اليهود Become Jews
(Origins of Modern Rabbinic Judaism)

Despite the uninformed beliefs of most Christians and Jews, modern Rabbinic Judaism crystallizes in the 10th century C.E. thanks to the efforts of Saadya Gaon and other 10th century sages and emissaries from the Gaonic academies of Mesopotamia. From then on it becomes legitimate to use the term Jew in lieu of Judaean. This time period was a general age of theological consolidation for cultures derived from ancient Hellenism. Christian theology attained its final form in the Roman West and the Byzantine East with the exception of some developments linked to the Protestant Reformation. The stimulus for such consolidation among Christians and Jews may have been the finalization of Islamic theology with the Sunni rejection of the doctrine of المُعْتَزِلَة (the Mu`tazilah).[16] We can only speculate why the Gaonic form of Judean religion became dominant as modern Rabbinic Judaism, but there is evidence from Geniza studies that the Geonim were in communication with elite of the Khazar Turks, who seem to have converted en masse to Judean religion between the 8th and 9th centuries as they migrated westward from Central Asia into Southern Russian and the Ukraine and t hen into the Balkans. The Khazar elite may have provided funding to the Gaonic academies, whose form of Judean religion thus had a tremendous advantage over other forms of Judean religion like modern Karaitism in the competition for the hearts and minds of adherents of Judean religion.

Modern Rabbinic Judaism could well be a product developed jointly by a collaboration of the Geonim and the Khazar Turks.[17] Even if not, modern Rabbinic Judaism is still properly understood as the youngest of the Abrahamic religions.[18] It originates in the Diaspora, and its natural environment is the Diaspora. The Zionist assertion of having returned (Rabbinic) Judaism to its native soil is about as anachronistic as a claim can be and serves as nationalistic propaganda that is most effective among Jews whose origins are Central and Eastern Europe.

Anachronism Upon Anachronism:
Eastern European Jews Become Ashkenazim
(Origins of the Autochthonous Eastern European Ashkenazi Ethnic Group)

During and subsequent to the time period when communities practicing Judean and related rites became modern Rabbinic or modern Karaite Jews, there is no evidence of any migration from the Middle East or N. Africa to medieval Central or Eastern Europe except for a small migration into France from Egypt and N. Africa during the late 12th and early 13th century and another migration into Hungary during the 100 year occupation by the Ottoman Empire that ends in the middle 16th century.

All archeological, historical, ethnographic, linguistic and textual evidence available to us is consistent with the assumption that Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, most of whom later came to be known as Ashkenazim, are an autochthonous population of Eastern Europe or Southern Russia and have practically no ancestry from the ancient Palestinian Judean communities of the Greco-Roman period or earlier.[19] Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were an indigenous population whose Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, Celtic and Romanic ancestors assumed some form of Judean cultic practices long ago and then were subsequently Judaicized to Rabbinic Judaism like almost all populations that practiced some form of the ancient Judean religious rites.[xi]

At first only Jews in the region bounded by the Rhine, Danube and Elbe called themselves Ashkenazim (viz Figure 2). There is a good possibility that many early Judean-rite immigrants to this region came from the Turkic Khazar Empire, for the time frame of the founding of the Ashkenazi communities in German territories corresponds roughly to a period of increasing practice of Judean rituals within the Khazar Empire and continuing migration of Eastern populations westward. There is also considerable archeological evidence of western migration of refugees when the Empire finally dissolved and was overrun.[xii]

The use of the term Ashkenazi for self-identification is suggestive in and of itself. Ashkenazi is a Hellenistic Judean Hebrew-Aramaic term for Scythian (also known as Ashguzai), Turk, Phrygian, Mysian or Ascanian. Geographically, the term is associated with Southern Russia, Western Turkey and parts of the Balkans. During the period of the Khazar Empire, Khazars that practiced Judean rites probably called themselves Ashkenazim because of this traditional terminology. Khazar immigrants to Central Europe could have joined already existing pre-Ashkenazi com munities of Celts and Germans that followed some form of Judean or related religion. Probably, Khazar immigrants, associated with the activities of Radanite merchants, dominated these communities economically, intellectually and culturally. As Central European populations that practiced pre-modern Judean cults were gradually Judaized to modern Rabbinic Judaism, they forgot their actual origins like many other European populations. When only memory remained of the name by which the dominant element described itself, all Central European Jews came to be known as Ashkenazim, and the Central European German speaking region became the original territory of Ashkenaz.[20]

Before Eastern Europe became the eastern region of greater Ashkenaz, it was a major source of slaves during the Medieval period and was at first known as Canaan in Jewish writings because Hellenistic Judean Aramaic used Canaanite as a common term for slave just as most Medieval European languages and Medieval Arabic used some variant of the word Slav as the word for slave.[21]

There were some basic differences between Ashkenaz and Canaan simply because the Ashkenaz region was mostly Germanic linguistically while Canaan in the early period was mostly Slavic in terms of language, but the critical historical divergence between Central and Eastern Europe takes place in 1648.

In Central Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended The Thirty Years War, had the effect of excluding religion as a cause for war in Western and Central Europe.

In Eastern Europe, the Chmielnicki Rebellion results in a series of slaughters of Polish Roman Catholics,[22] Polish Jews and Ukrainian Orthodox.[xiii] Relations among the three groups begin a long downward slide. Confessionalism, which is religious hatred without religious belief, takes root in Eastern Europe as a precursor to the development of modern ethnic identities.

Figure 2 from A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names by Alexander Beider

The short-term consequences of Chmielnicki Rebellion included the absorption of Poland and the Ukraine into the empires of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Russian Romanovs while Jewish Canaan completed its merger into Ashkenaz. As a result, Eastern European Jews finished the linguistic shift from derivatives of West Yiddish and from Slavic (as well as possibly Turkic, Romanic or Yavanic) languages to East Yiddish, which is basically a Germanoslavic creole or fusion language. Nowadays, practically all Jews whose origins lie in Central and Eastern Europe are considered Ashkenazim.[23]

In the long-range the effects of the Treaty of Westphalia and the Chmielnicki Rebellion defined the 19th century evolution of modern nationalism, which demanded that the nation and the state must be congruent.

• France and the UK, belonging wholly to the area of the Treaty, developed a secular civil or voluntary nationalism according to which citizenship conferred membership in the nation,
• Germans, whose territories came to span the regions of the Treaty and the Rebellion, tended toward secular organic nationalism according to which the individual was analogous to a cell in the organic body of the nation and the state was identified with a specific ethnonational group, and
• Eastern Europeans including Ashkenazim developed a confessional organic nationalism according to which the specific ethnonational group to which the state belongs was strictly defined on confessiona l boundaries even though religious belief declined precipitously among Eastern Europeans during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

The pattern of secularity and confessionalism among Central and Eastern Europeans held true even during Nazi persecutions of European Jews. Nazi Germans claimed to abuse Jews on strictly racial grounds while Eastern European collaborators generally showed strong confessional tendencies in their persecutions.

In the Modern Period: Not only Anachronism But Also Exceptionalism and Omission

Modern Ashkenazi history no more takes place in a vacuum than Greco-Roman Judean history, but modern historiography of Ashkenazim is flawed not only by anachronism as Hobsbawm points out bu t by exceptionalism and omission. Exceptionalism is probably either Zionist or racist in origin. Omission is characteristic of all false and propaganda histories. Zionist historians have gotten away with this sort of intellectual dishonesty far longer than most similar historian-propagandists.

Exceptionalist histories of Ashkenazim avoid connecting Ashkenazi social, political, intellectual and economic history to the Central and Eastern European environments in which they lived. Exceptionalist history serves Zionist purposes because prejudiced historians and propagandist can avoid interpreting Zionist ideology and actions as part of the general tapestry of European aggression, imperialism and colonialism against the non-Western world. Instead, such exceptionalist pseudohistorians can portray well-meaning Zionist settlers as merely reacting to groundless savagery and hostility according to the Zionist formula popularized by Herzl in Altneuland.[24],[xiv] At the same time such exceptionalist histories are fundamentally racist because they follow a standard Judeophobic racist formula that As hkenazim are non-Europeans that have no place in Europe.

In the non-exceptionalist history of the 17th and 18th century, Ashkenazim in Central and Eastern Europe faced the common issues related to modernization of traditional societies just like all other Central and Eastern Europeans. For the most part Ashkenazim selected one of three possible responses. The earliest and most commonly chosen reaction was Enlightenment (השכלה) and assimilation. Most Eastern European and practically all German and Austrian Ashkenazim selected this path,[25] which was particularly easy for the latter group because there were no major ethnolinguistic distinctions between German-Austrian Ashkenazim and other German-speakers and because most German nationalists had no inclination to exclude German Ashkenazim from German ethnicity or identity until the later part of the 19th century.[26] German Ashkenazim were Germans just like German Protestants or German Roman Catholics, and Ashkenazi identity in Germany was purely religious.

Somewhat later Yiddishism developed as a particularly Eastern European populist Ashkenazi response to modernization.[27] Yiddishism developed into several distinct movements that sought Yiddish cultural autonomy in various forms. Yiddishism was an expression of the developing Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic identity that was distinct from Jewish religious identity and unprecedented in the history of Jewish religion since the 10th century. Zionism was primarily an even later development among a very small group of elit ist Central and Eastern European Ashkenazi intellectuals that were estranged both from Jewish religion and from Eastern European Ashkenazi culture. Such Ashkenazi intellectuals are typically called non-Jewish Jews, but they are more correctly identified as non-Jewish Ashkenazim. The animosity between Yiddishists and Zionists was immens e in practically every way (viz Figure 3).

Zionism like practically all other 19th century Eastern European nationalist movements makes its first appearance as a rerun and translation of Polish nationalist ideology into Ashkenazi terms. The Medieval Polish Rzeczpospolita (Republic) provides the archetype of the anachronistic mythological lost nation state that must be restored. Even though important Polish nationalists had proto-Zionist or Zionist beliefs and even canvassed the Polish Ashkenazi community for support of both Polish nationalism and also of Zionism, no history of Zionism mentions the connection of Polish nationalism with early Zionist thought while the standard histories like those of Walter Laqueur, Howard Sachar or Arthur Hertzberg dig up a long list of fairly implausible Jewish forerunners of Zionist ideas. This effort looks more like a dishonest attempt to establish the internal Jewish legitimacy of Zionism and to deny the connection with Polish nationalism than to provide historical illumination.

To find fully integrated analysis of the politics of Polish Ashkenazim within the context of political developments within all Poland, one must search outside the standard histories of Zionism or of Ashkenazim in texts of general European political history like Fire in the Minds of Men by James H. Billington[28] or in Polish language biographies and memoirs of Polish nationalist leaders. The absence of investigation of the Polish influence in the origins of Zionism may be symptomatic of the anti-Polish and anti-Slav prejudice of many historians that specialize in Jewish studies.

Polish nationalism is hardly the only Slavic influence or source for proto-Zionism or early Zionism. The influence of Russian culture is fairly obvious although hardly ever mentioned in the standard histories of Zionism. Czar Alexander II encouraged a very Palestine oriented form of Russian Orthodoxy especially in the 1870s and sponsored the pilgrimage of tens of thousands of Russians to Palestine. Shortly after the institution of this program the ציון חבת (Love of Zion) movement appears among Russian Jews. The development of Zionism among Russian Ashkenazim could be a symptom of the thoroughness of the Czarist Russianization program that had made Russian the primary language of most of the world's Jews by 1905. The absence of discussion of the influence of Russian social, political and religious culture in the development of early Zionist thought suggests anti-Russian or anti-Slavic bias and a conscious distortion of the history of Zionism by historians asso ciated with Jewish studies.[xv]

The Known Facts

There is no doubt that German, Austrian and Russian social, political and intellectual culture served as the main influence on the three primary leaders of Zionism from the 1890s through the first decades of the 20th century, for Herzl the journalist, Nordau the social critic and Жаботинский (Jabotinsky) the literateur were the most non-Jewish of Ashkenazim. Like most German, Austrian and Russian intellectuals of the fin de siécle, they were all anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, collectivist, anti-democratic and social Darwinist. Even though in their own minds they were very much members of the European elite and men of great personal achievement, they found themselves excluded from the highest ranks of German, Austrian and Russian society in a manner somewhat analogous to the treatment of Burakumin in Japan or Hakka in China.[29] For such cultured men espousing "primitive" Eastern European Ashkenazi Yiddishism was simply out of the question.

Figure 3 The literary battleground between Yiddishists and Zionists.[30]

Instead, they redefined the Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group as the Pan-Judaic Jewish nation on Pan-German and Russian Pan-Slavic models.[31],[xvi] Herzl was quite frank in his diary that Central European German and Austrian Ashkenazim, who were not a Volk or Race in the Pan-German sense, would have to be shaped into a nation.[32] Naturally, Herzl, who was developing a primordialist pan-Judaic fiction of ancient Jewish glory for Zionists, found inspiration in Wagner's attempt to create a modern myth of a heroic German past for romantic nationalist pan-Germanists.[33]

Herzl's pan-Judaic Zionism looks like a combination of the ideas of Western European and perhaps Russian imperialist colonialism with the pan-German ideology of the Austrian politician and racist anti-Semite Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who founded the Pan-German party, a direct ancestor of the Nazi party and who achieved the rank for which Herzl longed. Herzl's newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, carried many stories about von Schönerer and his party.[xvii] A genuine historian that sought the inspiration a nd model for Herzl's Zionism would probably investigate connections between Herzl and von Schönerer and not waste time on insignificant rabbis like Yehuda Alkalai[34] and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer or Ashkenazi eccentrics like Moses Hess in a propagandistic effort to provide a Jewish lineage and legitimacy for Herzl's ideas.

The origins of Nordau's and Jabotinsky's ideas come no less from the Austrian, German and Russian cultural milieu than Herzl's. The nation, body and violence worship of the racist anti-Semite Turnvater Jahn, who founded the German nationalist gymnastic movement in the early 19th century, apparently had a strong influence on both Nordau and Jabotinsky[35]. Jabotinsky was fortunate in developing his form of Zionist ideology in th e Russian culture milieu from whose models of gunpowder imperialism, colonialism and expansionism he could draw directl y.

The fascination that racist anti-Semites held for the three patriarchs of Zionism is not a little bizarre but does make sense in terms of their personal belief systems and of their goals for European Ashkenazim. The attraction that anti-Semitic public personalities exerted over them is also not particularly hard to document even though it rarely appears in Zionist histories. Nordau had a particularly long-standing, somewhat twisted and probably sexual relationship with the rather notorious Russian anti-Semite Olga von Novikoff, to whom he dedicated his play The Right to Love.[36]

The Scary Story

Jabotinsky's thought and behavior crosses the line from the peculiar and disconcerting to the scary. His writings of the naughts and teens of the twentieth century were far more creative and innovative than either Herzl or Nordau. A lot of this material is either not translated or is badly translated from Russian to English or to Hebrew. "Сионизм и Палестина" ("Sionizm i Palestina" – Zionism and Palestine) in Еврейская Жизнь (Evreiskaia zhizn' – Hebrew Life), no. 2 (February 1904), p. 205, proclaims a very strong primordialist blood and soil form of nationalism.

[The] tie between Zionism and Zion is for us not only an ineradicably strong instinct, but also an empirically proven consequence of strictly positivist study (пробньи, законньи вывод строго-позитивного размышление -- probnyi, zakonnyi vyvod strogo-pozitivnogo razmyshlenie).[37]

Subsequent discussion combines the blood and soil logic with social Darwinism to create a very basic form of biological determinism. In short, Jabotinsky develops in the naughts a political ideology that combines extremist organic nationalism, primordialism, biological determinism and social Darwinism. Zionist historians either credulously or disingenuously describe Jabotinksy's occasional and perfunctory protestations of devotion to democracy, liberalism and Enlightenment ideals to English-speaking audiences as indicative of his fundamental beliefs. Yet, in Russian Jabotinsky never wavered in his anti-democratic anti-bourgeois anti-liberal ideals. In short, Jabotinsky created about two decades in anticipation of Hitler a complete abstract form of Nazism.[38] Labor Zionists were correct when they called him Vladimir Hitler with the qualification that Jabotinsky's abstract Nazism is an independent creation and crystallizes earlier than German Nazism.[39]

Americans incorrectly view Nazism as a uniquely horrible movement that requires singularly evil political leaders. In reality Nazism is just a specific conglomeration of 19th century fin de siécle ideas. Nazism can occur over and over again if we fail to keep guard against it. The component ideas of Nazism suffused the intellectual milieu of Central and Eastern Europe. Jews and Non-Jews were equally likely to incorporate them into their Weltanschauungen.[40],[xviii] The ideology of Sharon and his government, with which the USA is allied, is on the straight line of development from Jabotinsky's abstract Nazism. If one understands Modern Israeli Hebrew and German, the similarity of political discourse in Israel and 1930s Germany is striking. Despite the portrayal in US media there is hardly any debate about transfer among Israeli Jewish politicians. Usually, the discussion focuses mostly on manner and on means.[xix]

Exceptionalism and Omission: A Fantasy Pretending to Be History

The disconnection between reality and American perception of Zionism directly relates to the Zionist control of the historical and political analysis taught in American universities. The indoctrination then percolates outward into primary and secondary school education as well as into the journalistic and popular medi a. Two examples can show some of the perniciousness of Zionist historiography. A conscientious college course whose topic related to Zionism might include readings from The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell or from Zionism and the Arabs 1882 – 1948, A Study of Ideology, by Yosef Gorny, for these two books are probably the best of Zionist historiography, and there is some internal evidence that at a conscious level both authors tried to transcend the mindset of Zionist propaganda and write genuine history even though they were mostly unsuccessful.

Zeev Sternhell

Sternhell is one of the leading experts on late 19th and early 20th European political movements of which Zionism is one example. The Founding Myths of Israel purports to be a genuine history of the development of Labor Zionist ideology even as it makes an internal Israeli political argument for a new civil nationalist form of Zionism. The political argument is mostly irrelevant to the topic of pre-state Zionist historiography while the actual concept that Sternhell advocates is oxymoronic. As an historian Sternhell made his reputation with several books and papers on the origin and development of fascist and nationalist socialist thought. In the historical framework that Sternhell has developed, nationalist socialism is a nationalist revision of Marxist s ocialism according to which the class struggle is transcended via national revival while fascism combines opposition to bourgeois democracy with extremist organic nationalism, nationalist socialism and state corporatism, which places industry and agriculture under the collective control of worker syndics or unions in coordination with the government.

The Founding Myths has some value in its discussion and analysis of Labor Zionist ideology, but for the most part, it tends consciously or unconsciously to subtle Zionist propaganda and disinformation. Sternhell admits facts that are harmless or indisputable. He notes that the Zionist linguistic program is fairly typical of Eastern European nationalist political movements. He admits that the Labor Zionist ideologist Berl Katznelson plagiarized ideas from the Henri de Man, the leader of Belgian fascism. Sternhell even admits that the Zionist state is racist albeit somewhat cravenly, for he uses the German word völkisch instead of plain English.[41] Yet, The Founding Myths remains a unique example of Zionist exceptionalism, for Sternhell fails to apply to Labor Zionism the same intellectual appar atus by which he analyses fascist and nationalist socialist movements or ideologies in Neither Right nor Left and his other publications. Thus, Sternhell's own historical analysis of Zionism is exceptionalist with regard to Sternhell's own historical analysis outside Zionism.[xx]

When readers have asked Sternhell to explain why Labor Zionism is not a fascist ideology, Sternhell simply lies. He claims that Labor Zionists were not anti-democratic. The main Labor Zionist ideologist Victor Arlosoroff did not conceal his anti-democratic political positions while Labor Zionists invariably opposed the creation of local democratic political structures in Palestine whenever the issue came up in discussions with the Mandatory government, and it is certainly impossible to call any movement democratic whose first act in achieving state power is the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the population. But Sternhell makes most of his argument by omission, for he fails to place Zionism in the Eastern European context, where Fascist movements and ideologists under the influence of the myth of the ancient Polish Rzeczpospolita have generally preferred a formal democracy that concealed an undemocratic political military oligarchy to outright antidemocratic political forms and structures.

From the creation of the State of Israel through the 60s the oligarchic structure of the Israeli state has been obvious, for citizens were given the option of voting for party lists chosen by the parties. Later, the Zionist government has used more subtle means to discount the votes of non-Zionist elements of the population especially as the native proportion of the population has increased. In a genuine democracy, we would expect the government of the state to change as the demography of the state changes. In non-democratic states like Israel the political leadership develops a strategy to change the demography of the state[42] to maintain the power of political elite.

Yosef Gorny

Despite its problems Sternhell's work has a lot of value, but Gorny's has less. It is a measure of the quality of pre-State Zionist historiography that this text has become more or less the standard work from which Hebrew and English speakers learn this area of ideological history. Even Finkelstein cites him rather uncritically. Zionism and the Arabs embodies every questionable aspect of Zionist historiography. The least of its flaws is the use of ideological terminology in the presentation of an "alleged" history of ideological development. The book uses expressions like "return of Jews to Palestine" instead of "emigration of Ashkenazim to Palestine."

Gorny is a complete and utter historical exceptionalist. He is blind how Slavic racist the Zionist theory of relations with the native population is. The argument whether Palestinians[xxi] are a genuine nation show the typical logic by which Slavic nationalists deny minorities national or cultural rights. Extremist Slavic nationalists invariably casuistically describe people whose rights are to be denied as a народность (nationality) and not as a народ (nation).

Gorny unlike Sternhell is also blind how thoroughly German völkisch racist Zionist ideology about relations with the native population is. The argument whether Palestinians are a genuine people or defined only negatively in response to Zionism evinces the typical logic that German racists applied to Ashkenazim when they argued that Ashkenazim were a Gegenvolk (i.e., an anti-people) and not a genuine Volk (i.e., a people in the racial spiritual sense of German Romanticism)?

Gorny simply ignores the effects of the Nazi persecutions on Zionist ideology. When one reads Zionist literature of the 40s or often even earlier, one cannot help but notice that Palestinians had become surrogates in the thinking of many of the Palestine-resident Zionist leaders for all the supposed European persecutors of Ashkenazim in the false "pogrom and persecution" version of Ashkenazi history that Ashkenazim commonly believe. It is simply mind-boggling that the UN could propose in 1947 to place so many Arabs under the rule of people so likely to view them as reasonable targets of revenge for every real and imagined grievance against someone else.

Nevertheless, according to Gorny's narrative Zionist leaders are invariably moderate and reasonable while Arab leaders are extreme, unreasonably and unwilling to negotiate. He omits to mention that Shakib Arslan as an agent al-Hussayni and later various Syrian Nationalists offered to facilitate the immigration of Ashkenazim into Arab countries if Zionists would renounce the goal of making Palestine a Jewish state. Arabs offered Ashke nazim more in the way of refuge than the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia or anyone else, but this fact is absent from practically all histories of the Pre-State Zionism[43] because it belies "the compelling necessity" argument for Zionism.[xxii] Gorny dismisses pre-State Arab attempts to negotiate just as Barak did at Camp David. Like most Zionists Gorny does not permit the facts to interfere with his worldview.

Gorny includes the usual counterfactual nonsense that the rumor of the murder of an Arab boy by a Zionist settler immensely disturbed העם אחד (Ahad Haam, Asher Ginzburg[44]) even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazim were any less violent than other Eastern and Central Europeans. In Eastern Europe throughout the 19th century and 20th century, Ashkenazim took part in revolutionary and terrorist violence just like all other Eastern European ethnic groups.[45] In Palestine during the teens Ashkenazi שומרים had no reluctance to use violence, terrorism and intimidation to claim property illegitimately or to deny Palestinians their legitimate non-title rights to land use.[46]

In the aftermath of WW1, rage, disappointment and anger drove many demobilized soldiers to join or form private militias.[47] Tough violent former soldiers existed just as frequently among Ashkenazim as they did among all other Central and Eastern European populations. The Yiddish novel, Steel and Iron by I. J. Singer, focuses on such a tough former Jewish soldier. It is a great novel that portrays a reality very different from the Zionist anti-Diaspora ideology of passive and weak Diaspora Jews. Such Zionist anti-Diaspora attitudes represent genuine irrational anti-Semitism unlike the Palestinian anti-Zionist resistance, which is simply a normal reaction to murderous genocidal racism and theft.

Not only does Gorny ignore 19th and early 20th century history of Ashkenazim in Europe, he fails to contextualize the Zionist ideology of the relationship with native Palestinians in the framework of Eastern and Central European Orientalist discourse, particularly that which is associated with Russian imperialism and colonialism in Central Asia. Nowadays, scholars probably do not put the Prussian or Austrian policy of colonization, domination and Germanization in Eastern Europe in the same category as European colonialism and imperialism in the 3rd world, but in the 19th century the similarities were undeniable, and Ashkenazim were often in the position of local collaborators with the foreign Austrian or Prussian overlords.[48] One could argue that Herzl's Altneuland was a sort of personal advertisement of a would-be colonial surrogate population for an imperial motherland.

Because Germany and Austria had no imperial possessions, German Orientalism of the Ancient and Modern Middle East or India was generally accounted a subspecialty of Classics and therefore tended to relegate even modern Arabic cultures to a non-living status.[49] German Ashkenazi Zionists stee ped in German Semitics had no problems in denying the national and human rights of the members of dead cultures. German Indology, which had a direct input into Nazi theories of Aryan superiority, probably also had indirect influence on Zionism through the idea of Umvolkung or population supplantation as it developed in extremist German nationalist discourse to justify the displacement of inferior races.

Gorny disregards completely this ideological framework, which first appears among Zionist ideologists during the naughts and the teens in discussions of the transfer or removal of Arabs. German Nationalists called such a process Umvolkung or population supplantation. Hitler's Professors[xxiii],[50] by Max Weinreich describes in detail the Nazi Umvolkung program. Landeskunde or knowledge of country was the linchpin of this program, whose first step comprised dispatching academics and archeologists to find archeological evidence of ancient ancestors. The historical presence of ancient Teutons or the shedding of Germanic blood in a region would be verified to justify replacement of the current residents with German settlers. Thus, German academic Landeskunde was an intimate part of the racist German theory and practice of relations with subordinate non-Germans.

ידיעת הארץ (yedi`at ha'arets, a loan translation of Landeskunde) is the transference of racist German practices and theory to the Zionist context of relations with Palestinians. ידיעת הארץ provides the evidence for the claim of superior rights of Ashkenazim to Palestine as Zionist leaders like Jabotinsky claimed on "a strictly positivist basis." If Zionism had not been so murderous and genocidal, there would almost be something sad and pathetic that a population like Eastern European Ashkenazim would be so ashamed of their own history that they would deny their own heritage and attempt to claim or to steal the history and heritage of another people.

Unfortunately, in the case of Zionism conflicted Ashkenazi feelings about their genuine ancestry lead to massive brutality and heinous crimes. From appropriating the archeological and historical sites of Palestine,[51],[xxiv] it was only a small step to stealing the property, expelling the population and destroying the evidence physical presence of the native population. ידיעת הארץ provides the basic ideological legitimization of Zionist expulsion of the native population of Palestine, which in current Israeli discourse is still the final solution to the Arab question within Zionism just as expulsion was the Nazi solution to the Jewish problem up to 1939.[xxv]

ידיעת הארץ directly ties Zionist ideology to German racist and Nazi ideology of purifying the lands of Eastern Europe of non-Germans. Yet, there is no mention of ידיעת הארץ or Umvolkung in a book that claims to be a study of ideology but is like practically all pre-State Zionist historiography really a whitewashing of a fundamentally racist genocidal program of colonial aggression against an innocent and inoffensive Arab population. Such historiography makes it possible to portray crimes against humanity as a just and heroic endeavor in which Zionist Ashkenazim and their supporters should take pride.

The Consequences of Zionist Historiography

The failings and distortions associated with the Zionist historiography, of which Sternhell and Gorny are in some sense the best examples, have obvious consequences and repercussions for American historical and political debate as well as the popular culture from which most Americans learn their history and develop their political choices.

…what people learned from … the writers of history books…

The excerpt in Figure 4 from a standard junior high school history textbook used in the Boston public school system shows how the Zionist control of historical discourse affects pre-college education. This item is hardly the worst example of questionable analysis contained in the book, but it is exceptionally pithy. Boston students do not learn history; they receive religious indoctrination and study Zionist legitimization narratives or myths.

This particular textbook is implicitly primordialist.[52] It does not explicitly say that modern Israeli Jews are descended from Ancient Judeans or Israelites of Canaan or Palestine, but why would anyone reading the text assume otherwise? Even if modern Ashkenazim were the descendants of Greco-Roman natives of Judea – as we know they are not -- does it make sense for people to attempt to claim the lands where their ancestors might have lived thousands of years ago? The text does not address this question, but the Bush administration answered the question at Durban at the UN World Conference Against Racism where it argued that for the sake of progress and economic development claims for compensation for events from only 200 years ago must be stayed or allowed to lapse.[53]

Figure 4, World History, Patterns of Interaction, McDougal Littel, p. 75.[54],[xxvi]

… what people learned from … television programmes [and movies] …

The ill effects of Zionist control of the political and historical discourse hardly cease with pre-college education. Americans are constantly bombarded with false and racist depictions of the conflict in the Middle East by the popular media. No one should wonder why American political leaders consistently side with Zionists on the question of Palestine. The following partial list of American produced and directed non-documentary non-docudrama feature films,[55] that specifically mention Israel, Israelis, Palestine or Palestinians, shows how much Hollywood and American Indie (Independent) cinema culture has assimilated or absorbed Zionist myths, attitudes and beliefs into its products for dissemination into the American and world market. [56],[xxvii] No Hollywood or American Indie studio has ever produced a feature film with a Palestinian point of view (viz Figure 5). In fact, the films reviewed contain a plethora of images and scenes in which Palestinians or Arabs kill countless innocent non-combatants while Israelis never kill Palestinian or non-Palestinian innocents, a record that even the US military and special forces cannot match in American film.

Figure 5 Only Zionists need apply.

Both explicit and implicit propaganda films are common. The stealth indoctrination of the American public begins in the 1950s.

• Ben-Hur (1959, MGM) contains a tremendous amount of metaphorical Zionist propaganda. The oppressive Roman Empire represents the British Empire, against which the Americanized Jewish[57] hero must struggle. The Arab Sheikh Ilderim is portrayed as effeminate and subordinate -- almost a second Esther in his relationship to Judah Ben-Hur.

It is a screen representation of the Zionist propaganda that national liberation of the Jews (i.e., stealing Palestine from the Palestinians) will bring liberation of the Arabs albeit as subordinates to the Jews. This movie sets the standard for very subtle and very effective Zionist indoctrination.[58]

• Solomon and Sheba (1959, MGM/UA) targets Ashkenazi Americans and superficial Zionistically-inclined biblical literalists.

Anachronism is pervasive in this film. The Star of David was completely unknown as an ancient "Israelite," Judean or even Jewish symbol until the last few hundred years. As a Jewish symbol, before Zionism the hexagram is associated mostly with Sabbatian and perhaps Frankist heresies. Yet, the troops of King David and King Solomon wear Stars of David on their uniforms, and it serves as a decoration throughout the film.

King Solomon, who is played by Yul Brynner, repeats all sorts of Zionist slogans throughout the movie, and the geopolitical situation described in the movie is obviously constructed to reflect the situation of the State of Israel in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the director, whose conceptualization of story the movie ultimately reflects, was King Vidor. King Vidor was one of the most talented of Hollywood directors. He directed the Wizard of Oz. He also had strong connection to Premillennial Dispensationalist Christianity. He grew up in Vidor, Texas, which was founded by his father C. S. Vidor. This town is still noted for irredentist unreconstructed Confederate attitudes, apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism, KKK connections and extreme racism. It is also very typical bedrock Texas community of the sort the supports George Bush.

Solomon and Sheba was not a blockbuster, but it did make money and was perhaps symptomatic of things yet to come.

• Exodus (1960, UA)[xxviii] is practically a course in Zionist הסברה or propaganda. It goes through practically all the standard false claims to justify Zionist Ashkenazi colonization and aggression against the native population of Palestine. The movie leaves out the book's characterizations of Arabs as smelly or dirty, but it does include the de rigueur association of Nazis with the anti-Zionist resistance. In point of fact Labor Zionists themselves tried very hard to work with Nazi Germany and did so fairly effectively until 1939 while al-Hussayni was fairly quickly dispatched to Bosnia, where he did not speak the language, when he finally tried to approach Germany for aid.

Both the director Otto Preminger and the author Leon Uris had many revisionist associations. Therefore, it is not too surprising that Exodus contains a Jabotinskian or Revisionist justification of Zionist terrorism that in 2002 underscores the hypocrisy of the Israeli and American Ashkenazi reactions to legitimate terrorism against the State of Israel. Like most Hollywood movies that contain the theme of nation creation, the movie ends with a poignant sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Exodus is particularly creative in this regard because one of the martyrs on behalf of Zionism is a Zionist Arab. Exodus is exceptionally explicit in sending the message that the USA should get in bed with Israel.

United Artists had a fair amount of success with Exodus and tried once again with Cast a Giant Shadow (1966, UA).This movie gives the story of Colonel Mickey Marcus, who was recruited by the Haganah, the Labor Zionist militia, to provide operational expertise. Marcus conveniently dies in 1948 so that the film can have the typical ending for films of nation creation. The movie lectures the viewer in the standard Labor Zionist הסברה but goes one step beyond Exodus to argue that American Ashkenazim should serve Israeli interests. The beginning of the movie is worth watching. It goes through all the standard Zionist propaganda that is still repeated in American schools, universities and media to this day. It portrays the Ashkenazi settlement as outnumbered although it was not. It claims Arab leaders made statements that are mostly impossible to verify. It claims that the Ashkenazim had no place to go even though the Ashkenazi displaced persons could have been resettled fairly easily within a few years while most of the Ashkenazi settlers in Palestine would probably have been happy for the colony to be dismantled. Major Safir, the Zionist emissary, makes the obligatory emotional pitch about the threat to the Ashkenazim in Palestine so that Marcus will only react reflexively rather than think rationally about the claims Safir makes because otherwise a little reflection might have lead to the revelation that the native population has just as much claim to liberty and justice as the Ashkenazi settler colonists. At the time Safir is supposed to give his speech, Zionist forces have already begun their ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

• Videoclip 1 and Videoclip 2 from the next film, Black Sunday (1977, Paramount), are rather more interesting. Not only is this movie the first action adventure film that combines the Israel-Palestine conflict with Neoconservative political thinking, but also this movie looks in retrospective exceptionally prophetic after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. One might hypothesize that Usama bin Ladin was inspired by the imagination of Thomas Harris, the author of Black Sunday as well as Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.
  

Michael Lander is a disgraced US Air Force pilot that plots with the help of Black September to kill 80,000 people and the president of the United States at a Superbowl football game by crashing an explosive laden blimp into the stadium. Because of the similarity of the movie's terrorist operation to the WTC attack, it is worth mention that that no Palestinian group was involved in the September 11 atrocity and that the perpetrators were members of an extremist group loosely associated with the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood (المسلمون الإخوان), which has its own distinct and often legitimate grievances against the USA. Such complaints, as Palestinians and other Arabs can make against the USA, do not interest Harris, who focuses mostly on the psychopathology of the killer. Palestinians, the Middle East conflict and Black September are mostly props in his book. Harris suggested a possible connection of Black September to Vietnamese communists by means of a videotape of Lander s confession to war crimes while he was a POW during the Vietnam war. The screenwriter made the connection to international anti-Americanism by explicitly portraying collaboration with Japanese terrorists.

Both the movie and the book are somewhat unique in that they begin with murders of Arabs by an Israeli death squad in Lebanon. Normally, Israeli terror squads are portrayed as retaliating for some on-screen act of violence, but Harris' lack of interest in Middle East issues may have immunized him to some extent to the common Zionist attitudes that most Americans have adopted.[59] Nevertheless, the terrorist act itself corresponds far more to Zionist mythology than to actual Palestinian operations at the time, which generally confined themselves to the seizure of hostages or airplanes to secure the release of prisoners that were held by Israelis under torture and the threat of execution at any time.

The director and the scriptwriter went beyond the book to explore motivations and the cause of the conflict. In the movie Major Kabokov, the Israeli protagonist, suffers from the usual "whack 'em and weep syndrome." Harris and the screenwriter portray such as qualms as explicitly negative in conformance with the Neoconservative ideology that is developing at the time. If Kabokov had not shown mercy toward Dahlia Iyad in Beirut, the Black September attack would have been stopped before it could even stop.

Kabokov's self-doubts belong to the films subtheme of recovering masculinity. The US agents are paralyzed by procedures and rules that prevent them from taking the necessary action to stop the terrorists. Lander's masculinity has been permanently damaged by his imprisonment in Vietnam. The paralysis of US intelligence agents and Lander's impotence serve as fairly obvious metaphors for the Vietnam syndrome. Lander uses the wrong methods to overcome his sexual dysfunction by sexual and terrorist collaboration with Iyad, who lends Lander evil power by means of Arab sensuality and seduction. She makes Lander hard and tou gh once again as she directs him to undertake a terrorist attack on behalf of Black September. In contrast, when Kabokov overcomes his self-doubts in response to the killing of his partner and thwarts the terror attack, he becomes in conformance with Neoconservative ideology the forceful Israeli that teaches Americans how to deal with foreign and in particular Arab threats.

The scenes of the auditing of the Black September post-attack tape and of the identification of the Dahlia Iyad by Egyptian security are worth reviewing. The message that Iyad reads is far more powerful in the movie than in the book while the identification scene was created for the movie.

One can only speculate why it was necessary in the movie to identify Iyad as an Arab of German Palestinian extraction. Perhaps after showing some sympathy with Palestinian suffering, the director might have felt an obligation to pander Zionist myth of the Arab German link in the opposition to Zionism. Or perhaps, the director just needed explain the portrayal of a Palestinian woman by an actress of German extraction.

I also have to wonder whether the director was reluctant from the start to portray Arabs as relentlessly negative as Harris wrote in the book. While there could have been some last minute editing of the film in response to Sadat's peace initiative, there might be a subtle indoctrination that the validity of Arab or Palestinian grievance is irrelevant. Arabs and Palestinians are too dangerous, and the coalition of Americans and Israelis must crush them without mercy in all their schemes.

The movie's ending differs significantly from that of the book. While Harris' book is on the whole rather flawed, his denouement in which Kabokov sacrifices himself to stop Iyad and Lander would have created a far superior climax for the movie. A powerful cinematic ending seems to have been sacrificed to the desire to provide a triumphalist Neoconservative conclusion to the film.

Time after Time (1979, WB) also repeats the standard Zionist lie that Palestinian terrorists committed senseless violence against masses of innocent civilians. None of the references to completely fictional Palestinian terrorism have any intrinsic connection to the plot but serve almost as a subliminal indoctrination of the audience. This sort of incidental propagandization of the American public is probably more sinister than the thematic use of Zionist myth, which is more obvious and easier to dismiss as obvious nonsense.

• Golda (1982, Paramount) is a biography of Gold Meir that is mostly hero worship and Labor Zionist הסברה. The descriptions of the issues of Palestinian refugees and of access to Jerusalem are simply dishonest. The movie probably correctly but accidentally portrays Meir as a person that lacks any ethical awareness, understanding and impulses. In the clip presented she has the nerve to ask the self-serving question what population could remain a refugee population for 30 years even though she herself is the leader of the movement that made them refugees and even though the Zionist movement justifies its seizure of Palestine by means of the primordialist argument that Jews have been refugees for 2000 years.

• Hanna K. (1983, Universal) is fascinating because of the timidity that Costa-Gavras shows in portraying ethically dubious Zionist beliefs, actions and behavior. The movie depicts problems in the life of an attorney loosely modeled on Felicia Langer. She is defending a Palestinian infiltrator. According to its own internal documentation, the IDF usually simply shoots unarmed infiltrators, but the director and writer uncritically accepts the Zionist viewpoint that Israel actually has a functioning legal system and that Zionists actually make effort to deal with difficult ethical questions as well as they can.[60]

Because the film concedes the possibility that aspects of Zionism might have morally problematic effects, major public con troversy accompanied general distribution. The clip shows Hanna, the prosecutor and the judge as they attempt to find an extra-juridical solution to the problem that the defendant presents. Note how the judge makes the usual irrational and unethical Zionist arguments to justify Zionism while he uses the usual psychological triggers about the Nazi persecutions to intimidate Hanna into accepting his viewpoint.

Hanna K. like Torn Apart[61] (1990, Warner Studios) and Double Edge[62] (1991, Faye Milano Limited Partnership) represents a sort of Liberal Israeli or Ashkenazi American fantasy, in which the Zionist heroes really are moral people that strive to overcome obstacles and do right in difficult situations. Such movies do not address the possibility that Zionism might be fundamentally ethically questionable. The depiction of Palestinians in these films corresponds to fantasies about Palestinians from Zionist narratives or propaganda and not to any sort of discernible reality. While individual Israeli settler colonists may be obnoxious or defend themselves violently in the course of the plot, only Palestinians ever commit crimes or aggression in this class of film.[63]

• Little Drummer Girl (1984, WB) was also released with a major controversy, which in retrospect is hard to understand, for the movie is similar to Black Sunday except for less examination of motivations. The movie begins with a Palestinian terrorist attack so that Israeli actions can be portrayed as legitimate retaliation. Even though the members of the Israeli hit team are particularly unpleasant as they murder and use non-Jews in order to track down and assassinate an important Black September leader, Zionist self-perception and claims are never challenged. In the course of the story the Palestinian terrorists specifically target an Israeli peace advocate, and the movie includes some "whack 'em and weep" Zionist blubbering.

• Oh God! You Devil (1984, WB) really demoni zes Arafat. The devil comments that he has had Arafat's soul for years. As far as 3rd world national liberation leaders go, Arafat does not seem much different from Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Ahmed Ben Bella, etc. His demonization in the USA is particularly incomprehensible except as a symptom of the pervasive assimilation by Americans of the Zionist point of view.

• Splash (1984, Touchstone Pictures).
• Schindler's List (1993, Universal) is unprecedented as an expression of extremist nationalist Likud הסברה. We know that the story is fundamentally a nation creation narrative because the movie ends with the death of Schindler to show that the people he lead became capable of standing on the own. This movie proved to be a genuine blockbuster[64] unlike earlier Zionist oriented films that were only moderately successful. Obviously, no one visits the cinemaplex for a lecture in Labor Zionist ideology.

This film is extremely problematic on several grounds. It is a consciously inverted film noir Wizard of Oz that markets its message subliminally. The evil of Nazism is reduced to psychopathology. Zionist ideologues prefer such an understanding of Nazism because genu ine analysis of the phenomenon of Nazism would find too many similarities to Zionism. As history, the movie embodies the serious failures of Zionist historiography to which Hobsbawm referred. The movie describes the Holocaust of Zionist myth not the historical שואה (or catastrophe). The Soviet officer makes the pitch of a שליח (a Zionist emissary that recruits new immigrants).

One must wonder how a Palestinian would view the conclusion. It shows the Schindler Jews, who mostly did not migrate to Palestine, as they step into a rebirth of color and into Jerusalem to the sound in the background of זהב של ירושלים, a song that celebrates the culmination of a series of dispossession, tragedies and expulsions of the native population and that is generally associated now with the extreme right in Israeli politics.[65]

Spielberg is indoctrinating the audience with the f ollowing propaganda.

a. The State of Israel is an appropriate monument to murdered European Jews even though the vast majority were either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and

b. making Palestine a Jewish state was proper recompense for persecution of European Jews despite the wishes of the majority native population (who in a sinister foreshadowing of planned expulsion or mass extermination are absent as the theme of the 1967 conquest is played).

I am not surprised that the Egyptian and many other governments had some serious issues with subjecting their populations to this sort of blatant Zionist propaganda.

There are a lot of ethical problems associated with the UN recommendation to partition Palestine along völkisch principles that violated the UN charter and that wronged the native population. Universal Studies should have given the film a voluntary NC-17 rating, for it is certainly wrong to indoctrinate young people and children with the idea that two wrongs make a right.

This ending was so close to the Likud formula for "national ritual assertion of Israel state identity and superiority" and conformed so exactly to the "central item of the official system of national beliefs" as promulgated by the Likud party that the ending had to be modified for Israeli audiences. USA popular culture has an even higher tolerance of the most extremist Zionist myth and propaganda than Israeli Jews do. One must wonder whether the success of such clever Likud propaganda at the box office presaged the failure of the Oslo Process.[xxix]

The frequency of the appearance of Zionized Hollywood films definitely increases over the period from 1950 to the present, but Americans were not necessarily exposed to less Zionist propaganda in the earlier period, for Israeli film makers made up for the lack of Zionized American cinema. Nowadays they do not have to bother because Hollywood routinely incorporates Zionist themes, propaganda and myths. The legitimization narrative has changed since the early period to depend more on the Holocaust than on Zionist ideology or primordialist myth.

Conclusion

The offhand appearance of Zionist attitudes in ordinary non-ideological movies is in some regards even more disturbing than the lies and misrepresentations of the consciously Zionist films. Obviously, the penetration of Zionism throughout American society is so deep and all pervasive that Americans express Zionist attitudes reflexively and unconsciously. The amount of effort required to counteract the Zionist indoctrination is simply daunting.

Zionist Intimidation and McCarthyism: Anti-Semitism, Judeophobia and Justified Hostility

The moment one expresses concern about the Zi onist domination of American attitudes and discourse one is accused of anti-Semitism. Yosef Gorny in his preface provides a useful comment on this issue even though his perspective is tainted by Zionist primordialist mythology.

During the last hundred years the Zionist movement has changed the course of Jewish history in several respects. One of them is in the protracted problem of Jews vis-à-vis non-Jews. By this I am implying that the relations, which have evolved in Palestine between the two peoples over the past century, are totally different from those of the Jewish people with any other nation throughout its lengthy history.

In other words, a term like anti-Semitism refers to a reality of the past not the present, is anachronistic and simply does not apply to the conflict over Palestine (viz Figure 6). It is a Pavlov trigger used to cause a reflex response instead of rational thought. On hearing the accusation of anti-Semitism the listener is supposed to think of poor oppressed Jews, who are being threatened with machine guns, instead of the current reality in which "Jewish" citizens of an ideologically racist "Jewish" state are engaged in ongoing oppression, plunder and genocide against the native population of Palestine. When a university president like Lawrence Summers of Harvard uses such tendentious, propagandistic and inappropriate terminology in a discussion of academic policy, one must question his fitness to lead an institution of higher learning. A person that uses the term anti-Semitism in a debate about Palestine is simply intellectually dishonest. Such a person should be denied any position of political or educational responsibility.

Genuine scholars avoid the use of the term anti-Semitism except in association with late 19th and early 20th century political ideologies that justified hatred or fear of Jews on the basis of pseudoscientific social Darwinist or biological determinist ideas. This form of hostility toward Jews was usually associated with important and often powerful Central or Eastern European political parties. The preferred academic term for generic hatred or fear of Judeans or Jews is Judeophobia. Many scholars, like Peter Schäfer in Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World, have often tried to find a common principle that links all instances of hostility towards Judeans or Jews from the conflicts between Judeans and non-Judeans in Greco-Roman times to today's worldwide hatred of Zionism, Israel and their supporters. Yet, the claim of a universal "anti-Semitic" phenomenon seems intellectually dishonest, delusional or paranoid because the historical conditions, alleged reasons for hostility, probable reasons for hatred and actions of the antagonists are for the most part very different in each supposed instance of anti-Semitism while the actual frequency of anti-Judean or anti-Jewish incidents in a specific area on careful study invariably proves to be quite small even in "historic" alleged "anti-Semitic" "hotspots."

In antiquity, citizens of a polis might have taken issue with Judean refusal to pay taxes to support the temple services to the gods that protected the cities while the Judean Rebellions probably inspired sporadic hostility toward Judeans as Roman imperial enemies, but such negative feelings seem hardly different from similar emotions directed at other times toward ancient Celts, Teutons, Persians, Carthaginians or Greeks. During the Crusades attacks on German Jewish communities seem to be a side effect of the Church's war agai nst Catharism and other heresies, whose adherents, in contrast to the Jews, were completely obliterated. After the wars of the Reconquista, the Spanish monarchs had no to lerance for religious diversity although they definitely wanted the Iberian Jews to remain in Spain and Portugal after conversion to Christianity. Central and Eastern European anti-Semitism seems to have grown out of a confessional form of extremist organic nationalism that did not target Jews specifically but has fomented attempts at the genocide of several populations in Central and Eastern Europe. Hatred of Zionism, the Zionist State of Israel and their supporters by Palestinians and anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause is hardly different from the hatred that Poles felt toward Germans and Nazis after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and acted to incorporate its territory into Nazi Mitteleuropa.[xxx]

Figure 6 The Meaninglessness of Anti-Semitism in Current Usage

The Evil That Zionism has created

Concentration on a theory of universal anti-Semitism to establish a grand unification of such totally different phenomena tends to serve as a distraction from the evil that Zionists planned and committed in murdering Arab Palestine and in driving out the native population. Such Zionist behavior is clearly comparable to Nazi goals for Eastern Europe. The evil is less well-known that Zionism created in forcing DPs (Displaced Persons) to settle against their will in the State of Israel after WW2 and in inciting Arab Muslim hostility toward Arab Jewish communities, which were ultimately destroyed as a result of Zionist crimes in Palestine. But the most insidious evil of Zionism from the standpoint of America lies in inspiring the alliance of American Zionists, Neoconservatives and Neoconfederates. These political factions have joined together in a commitment to maintain a racist Jewish colony in Palestine by means of the brutal oppression and suppression of the native population.

American Zionists are mostly inspired by misgu ided feelings of guilt and a confused need for atonement. But they have chosen an incorrect method of satisfying this need because giving Zionists a license to commit the sorts of crimes against native Palestinians that Nazis committed against European Jews is a completely mistaken form of expiation. American Zionists only succeed in supporting Zionist crimes against humanity in Palestine and in becoming a major driving force for anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice in the USA.

Neoconservatives are intellectual descendants and often the blue-stripe diaper babies of American Revisionists or Jabotinskians. They argue for a muscular American Empire so that Israel can serve as a middleman or colonial surrogate for the USA in the Middle East just as their forbears claimed a Jewish colony in Palestine could serve the British Empire. Neoconservatives thrive on the disorder that the presence of Israel creates, for they want the USA to treat the symptom by interfering with Arab governments, invading Arab countries and by stationing troops in the Middle East. Neoconservatives absolutely reject any idea of doing away with one of the major causes of Middle East turbulence by forcing the State of Israel to renounce Zionist racism and to make full rest itution for Zionist crimes against the native population.

Neoconfederates are white Apocalyptic Evangelical Fundamentalists. They are the most bizarre block of the supporters for Israel and really require a separate study. Intellectually they are the descendants of racist unrepentant and unreconstructed Southern Confederates, who turned to religion with the defeat of the Confederacy. They found spiritual solace in Premillennial Dispensationalism particularly in the form espoused by the Moody Bible Institute and Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. They believe that the creation of Israel in the 1947-8 murder of Arab Palestine is a genuine sign of the beginning of the End of Time. Because they believe they have a realized eschatology, they are completely irrational and think mythographically. They are extremely dangerous.[xxxi]

This unholy political union that is centered on the State of Israel brings together ideologies of racism, racist colonialism, prejudice, bigotry, social intolerance, religious intolerance, social Darwinism, biological determinism, imperialism, millennialism, extremist nationalism, contempt for democracy and contempt for human rights. Never has there been anything closer in the USA to a genuine American Nazism. Defeating this sort of politics is absolutely necessary for the salvation of American democracy and will require a long-term effort with careful planning.

What is to Be Done?

The battle starts at the most basic levels of popular and academic culture. Zionist ideas are so embedded in American thinking that discussing major political issues in the USA without accepting Zionist assumptions is practically impossible. The damage that this Zionist control of discourse does is practically all encompassing. It starts with the miswriting of history in academia and spreads outwards. In America, the field of Jewish studies begs practically all questions of history and ethics on subjects even only remotely connected with Zionism. Zionist professors and academics like Harvard's President, Lawrence Summers, have practically ruined the whole concept of a free and open academic environment in the USA.

The field of Judaica or Jewish Studies is the archetype of Zionized academia and the model for the future. Only subservience to Zionist interests remains. If genuine Jewish studies existed in the USA instead of a Zionist propaganda machine, the Palestine question would be a no-brainer. The USA would probably have kissed Israel goodbye long ago or bombed Israel into submission as it did Milošević. A US alliance with Zionism is a betrayal of ideals to which Americans are supposed to cling. To advocate or to support such an alliance is a betrayal of America. An American that supports or advocates this alliance is a traitor to fundamental American ideals whether he is the President, who holds office by a judicial coup, or an ordinary citizen. The foreign policy course for the USA is obvious and presents one of the few cases where ethics, ideology and pragmatism are congruent. To switch sides and treat Israel as an enemy would win many friends and no significant enemies. Regime change first in Palestine first to overthrow Zionism and then to bring to justice Zionist war criminals or perpetrators of crimes against human ity would probably have eliminated most opposition to military action against Saddam Hussein.

At the Local Level

Obviously, most of us do not have the resources to combat Zionism either at the national or university level, but parents in particular can play an important rôle. They have to be involved in politics at the community level because American Zionists are already there disseminating propaganda and falsehood.

Parents must force textbooks like World History, Patterns of Interaction out of the school systems and coerce the publishers to present history that has some connection to reality. But parents cannot stop there. In many states Holocaust instruction is mandated. These courses are very bad. Usually, the course materials are prepared directly or indirectly by the State of Israel so that no genuine history is taught, and the classes focus on legitimization myths for Zionism. Such courses distract from the crimes that have been committed in the USA like slavery and the genocide of the Native American population. Even the name is bad. Wiesel used the word holocaust to refer to the Nazi murders of Jews to suggest that the deaths were burnt offerings to God to sanctify the creation of the State of Israel. As the vast majority of the murdered were non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, Wiesel's nomenclature is offensive and insipid to say the least. The Yiddish word, חורבן (khurban), and the Hebrew word, שואה (sho'ah) are more appropriate, for they simply mean catastrophe like the نكبه (nakbah).[66] All Holocaust studies must be coupled with study of the Nakbah and of the crimes of Zionism because according the normal pattern in human history, which we probably wish to teach children to avoid, victims turn into victimizers at the drop of a hat. The שואה< /span> and Zionism provide an illustrative example.

Anti-Zionist activism must go beyond the public schools. Arab Americans and any American committed to justice must punish local politicians whenever they espouse Zionism. Then maybe national politicians will get the message. I know that some Muslims have religious problems with political participation. When someone argues that a true Muslim should not participate in an infidel government, I respond that the US government is no more an infidel than a tank or a fighter plane. The government is just a big machine that can be put to any use if one is willing to make the effort to control or influence it. Anyone that is unwilling to vote or to participate simply concedes the pow er of that government machine to Zionists or other bad guys that are willing to put their money and attention to working the political system. To concede such power to such forces is un-Islamic, for it is a service to injustice. We must all work to make anti-Zionism as reflexive in the USA tomorrow as Zionism is today.

What People Of Jewish or Ashkenazi Ancestry Can Do

Zionism and the State of Israel present people of Jewish or Ashkenazi ancestry with a severe ethical problem because Zionists claim to represent all Jewish people and Israel is self-defined as the state of the Jewish people. As long as Jews or Ashkenazim are silent, they give consent. There are four obvious models that they can use in acting against Zionism.

1. Doctor Seuss (Theodore Geisel) albeit an American of German ancestry took an avant-garde position to propagandize against everything for which Nazism stood and to advocate early entry of the USA into a war against Nazi Germany. American Jews and Ashkenazim have no excuse not to imitate Geisel with similar opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel.[67]

2. Marlene Dietrich took the position that if Nazis define what it means to be German, then she was not German. She left Germany and never hesitated to condemn Nazism and Nazi Germany. Israeli Jews could take exactly the same position, renounce their Jewishness as defined by the Israeli government, emigrate from Israel and denounce Zionism and the State of Israel at every possible chance.

3. Nataśa Kandić albeit a Serb never missed a chance to condemn Serb racism, to thwart Serb anti-Albanian action and to advise NATO to attack Serbia. Concerned Jews should condemn Zionist racism, work to thwart Zionist anti-Palestinian action and should demand that NATO attack the State of Israel on the same grounds that NATO took action against Serbia.

4. German anti-Nazi resistance groups like the White Rose undertook sabotage against Nazi Germany. Israeli Jewish groups should likewise undertake campaigns of sabotage against the State of Israel. In a sense, when Allegra Pacheco took Israeli citizenship to fight Zionism she was following the example of the White Rose.

As long as the effects of the last 50 years of Zionist indoctrination of the American population can be overcome, combined efforts of Jews and non-Jews of good will should be able swiftly to end the US-Israel alliance, to eliminate Zionism as a living political ideology and to obtain justice with restitution for the Palestinian people.

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