Wikipedia, Hummus, Falafil, WWI, Dolchstoßlegende

I was so intrigued with the discomfort that the Jewish Internet Defense Force showed when the Israelization of Palestinian food is identified as cultural theft on Wikipedia that I decided to follow up by modifying the Wikipedia Stab-in-the-Back Legend entry with some current thinking about the role the Zionist movement played in international politics at the beginning of the 20th century.

Here is my addition to the entry:

Was There a German Zionist Stab in the Back? [edit]

Even though Zionists do not normally figure in the Dolchstoßlegenden of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, John Cornelius proposes in "The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note"[1] that German Zionists with connections in the German foreign ministry may have passed to British Zionists a copy of the Zimmerman Note proposing a German alliance with Mexico. The publication of the Note was a major factor in bringing the USA into World War I.

The event time line is suggestive, and there is a debate whether the British could have decoded the Zimmerman Note on their own. According to this hypothesis, British Zionists traded a complete clear text version of the Zimmerman Note for the Balfour Declaration. Because the revelation of the Zimmerman Note was a major reason for the USA to declare war on Germany and its allies, any involvement of German Zionists in making the Note available to the British government would have constituted a genuine stab in the back for the German war effort.

Thus, because of access to previously inaccessible government archives (as well as to the wreck of the Lusitania), scholars now realize that

• Jews played a much larger part in sabotage, assassination, and revolutionary radicalism in Czarist Russia than previously believed,
• there might have been large monetary payoffs to British government officials as part of the Zionist effort to secure the Balfour Declaration,
• there was a lot of truth in the political polemic about Judeo-Bolshevism,
• there is a common pattern of Zionist Ashkenazi and Soviet Ashkenazi genocidalism,
• the Lusitania really was carrying war material during WW1, and
• some German Jewish Zionists may have stabbed the German Empire in the back during WW1.

Because scholars have made great strides since the 1990s in sorting war fact from war propaganda and in presenting modern Jewish history within a normal contextualized and non-exceptionalist framework, understanding of political and economic developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has changed immensely during the last two decades, and the revised historical version provides a reasonable lens through which Americans should evaluate the behavior of Jewish Zionists, who are already far too (maybe dangerously) overrepresented in the Obama administration.

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