The Holocaust, the BBC and Antisemitism Smears
Senior
BBC news reporter Orla Guerin has found herself in hot water of an
increasingly familiar kind. During a report on preparations for the
commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, she made a brief reference to Israel and an even
briefer reference to the Palestinians. Her reporting coincided with
Israel hosting world leaders last week at Yad Vashem, its Holocaust
remembrance centre in Jerusalem.
Here is what Guerin said over footage of Yad Vashem:
“In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young [Israeli] soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”
British
Jewish community leaders and former BBC executives leapt on her
“offensive” remarks, even accusing her of antisemitism. Guerin had
dared, unlike any of her colleagues in the western media, to allude to
the terrible price inflicted on the Palestinian people by the west’s
decision to help the Zionist movement create a Jewish state shortly
after the Holocaust. The Palestinians were dispossessed of their
homeland as apparent compensation – at least for those Jews who became
citizens of Israel – for Europe’s genocidal crimes.
Guerin’s
was a very meek – bland even – reference to the predicament of the
Palestinians after Europe’s sponsorship, from the 1917 Balfour
Declaration onwards, of a Jewish state on their homeland. There was no
mention of the Palestinians’ undoubted suffering over many decades or of
Israel’s documented war crimes against the Palestinians. All that
Guerin referred to was an indisputable occupation that followed, and one
could argue was a legacy of, Israel’s creation.
Holocaust weaponised
In
fact, as we shall see in a moment, Israel’s establishment is today
invariably and necessarily justified by antisemitism and its ultimate,
horrifying expression in the Holocaust. The two are now inextricably
intertwined. So Guerin’s linking of these two events is not only
legitimate, it is required in any proper analysis of the consequences of
the Holocaust and of European racism.
In
fact, the furore among Jewish groups in Britain seems all the more
perverse given that the Israeli media have extensively reported on
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit efforts to
weaponise the current Holocaust commemorations to harm the Palestinians.
He
hopes to leverage sympathy over the Holocaust to win assistance from
western capitals in bullying the International Criminal Court in the
Hague into denying that it has any jurisdiction over the Palestinian
territories Israel is occupying. That would prevent the court from
enforcing international law by investigating war crimes perpetrated by
Israel against the Palestinians. (In fact, aware of the diplomatic
stakes, the ICC’s prosecutors have so far shown zero appetite for
pursuing those investigations.)
This extract
from a commentary by noted Israeli human rights activist Hagai El-Ad,
published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Israel’s version of
the New York Times), gives a proper sense of how inadequate was Guerin’s
solitary reference to the Palestinians – and how her colleagues are
actually complicit through their silence in allowing Israel to weaponise
antisemitism and the Holocaust to oppress Palestinians:
“How dehumanizing [of Netanyahu and the Israeli government], to insist on denying a people’s last recourse to even an uncertain, belated, modicum of justice [at the ICC]. How degrading to do so while standing on the shoulders of Holocaust survivors, insisting that this is somehow being carried out in their name. …“It remains in our hands to decide if the past’s painful lessons will be allowed to be turned on their head in order to further oppression – or remain loyal to a vision of freedom and dignity, justice and rights, for all.”
History in the shadows
By
not echoing the rest of the western media in entirely airbrushing the
Palestinians out of Europe’s post-Holocaust history, Guerin stood
isolated and exposed. None of her colleagues – supposedly fearless,
muckraking journalists – appear willing to come to her aid. She has been
made a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim – one that will serve as a
future reminder to her colleagues of what they are permitted to mention,
which parts of Europe’s history they may examine and which parts must
remain forever in the shadows.
Guerin’s
comment was denounced as “offensive” by her former boss, Danny Cohen,
who was previously the director of BBC television. No one, of course,
cares that the Palestinians’ experience of being wiped out of recent
European history and its legacy in the Middle East is deeply offensive.
The Palestinians are what historian Mark Curtis refers to as “Unpeople”.
What
he and others meant by “offensive” was made explicit by the Campaign
Against Antisemitism (CAA), which argued that Guerin’s statement was
antisemitic.
The
CAA is one of the groups that, using similarly twisted logic, led the
attacks on the British Labour party over claims of antisemitism in its
ranks under leader Jeremy Corbyn. It helped to foist a
highly problematic new definition of antisemitism on the party that
downgrades concerns about racism directed at Jews to prioritise a
supposedly bigger crime: criticism of Israel. The International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition offers 11 examples of
antisemitism, seven of which refer to Israel rather than Jews.
Preposterously,
the CAA alleged that Guerin had violated one of these examples. It said
her report had included “drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and
the Nazis”. Very clearly, she had done no such thing.
Erasing the record
The
most that could be inferred from Guerin’s extremely vague, overly
cautious remark was two things. First, that Israel justifies the need
for a Jewish state on the threat to Jews posed by antisemitism (as
evidenced by the Holocaust). And second, that the resulting state of
Israel has inflicted a very high price on the Palestinians, who had to
be displaced from their homeland to make that state achievable. At no
point did Guerin make a comparison between the suffering of Jews in the
Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians.
She
simply, and rightly, hinted at a chain of related events: European
racism towards Jews culminated in the Holocaust; the Holocaust was used
by the Zionist movement to justify European sponsorship of a Jewish
state on the ruins of Palestine; Palestinians and their supporters feel
aggrieved that the Holocaust has become a pretext for ignoring their
plight and suppressing criticism of Israel. Each of those links is
irrefutably true. And unless the truth is now antisemitic – and there is
mounting evidence that it is being made so by Israel, its lobbyists and
western governments – what Guerin said was not conceivably antisemitic.
It
may seem obvious why Israel and its lobbyists would want to silence
criticism, or even a basic historical understanding, of the context and
consequences of Israel’s founding. But why are western officials
evidently so keen to aid Israel in this project of erasing the
historical record?
Israel could never
have been established without the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from
their homeland and the destruction of hundreds of their villages to
prevent any return. That is why a growing number of historians have
risked the wrath of the Israel lobby to declare these events ethnic
cleansing – in other words, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Western hypocrisy
Let
us note that the circumstances in which Israel was created were not
exceptional – at least, from the point of view of recent western
history. In fact, Israel is an example of a typical settler colonial
state. In other words, its creation depended on the replacement of the
native population by a group of settlers, just as occurred when
Europeans founded colonies in the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and elsewhere.
The
difficulty for Israel and its western allies has been that Israel’s
crimes are being committed in the modern era, at a time when the west
has claimed to have learnt the lessons both of its colonial past and of
the Second World War. In the post-war period the west promised to change
its ways, with a new commitment to international law and the
recognition of human rights.
The
shameful irony about the west’s complicity in Israel’s creation is that
Israel could only have been established through the dispossession and
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Those outrages occurred in
the very same year that, via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
western states pledged to create a different, better world.
In
other words, Israel was launched as an old-style western colonial
project at the very moment when the western powers promised to
decolonise, giving their colonies independence. Israel was embarrassing
proof of the west’s hypocrisy in promising to break with its colonial
past. It was evidence of bad faith from the outset. The west used Israel
to outsource its colonialism, to bypass the new limitations it claimed
to have imposed on itself.
A colonial spin-off
So
committed were the western powers to Israel’s success that France and
Britain helped it from the late 1950s to build a nuclear arsenal – the
only one in the Middle East – in violation of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty. Predictably, that further destabilised an already highly
volatile region as other states, especially Iraq and Iran, considered
trying to level the playing field by developing their own nuclear
weapons.
In
another sign of the west’s commitment to this colonial spin-off was its
determination to turn a blind eye in 1967 to Israel’s greedy expansion
of its borders in conquering the rest of historic Palestine. For more
than half a century Israel has been given free rein to entrench its
occupation and to build settlements in violation of international law.
All these decades later the International Criminal Court is still
dragging its heels – indefinitely, it seems – rather than prosecute
Israel for settlements that are irrefuably a war crime. And more than 50
years on, Europe continues to subsidise the settlements through trade
agreements and a refusal even to label settlement products.
Rather
than account for these outrageous violations of an international order
the west founded, Israel’s allies have helped to obscure or pervert this
real history. Israel has developed a whole industry, hasbara, to try to
prevent outsiders from grasping what has happened since 1948.
It
is therefore important for Israel and its western allies to promote
justifications for Israel’s creation that appeal to emotion, not reason,
as a way to dissuade observers from delving too seriously into the
past. In fact, there are only three possible justifications /
explanations for the transformation of what was once Palestine into
Israel, a state created by and for European Jews on the ruins of
Palestine. Two of these rationales play extremely poorly in the modern
west.
That
leaves only the third justification, as Guerin intimated in her report,
and one that resonates well in an age saturated with identity politics.
A Biblical promise
The
first justification says that the Zionist movement was entitled to rid
Palestine of the overwhelming majority of its Palestinian natives
because God promised Jews the land of Palestine thousands of years ago.
This argument tells Palestinians: Your family may have lived for
centuries or even millennia in Nazareth, Nablus, Bethlehem, Beersaba,
Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, Haifa but that counts for nought because God
told Abraham the land belonged to the Jews.
Let
us not discount the continuing power of this argument. It was what
inspired the 19th century, apocalyptic movement of Christian Zionism – a
longing for the “restoration” of Jews to the Promised Land to bring
about an end-times in which only true Christians would be saved.
Later,
Christian Zionism was repurposed and adopted by small numbers of
influential Jews like Theodor Herzl who realised they needed the support
of Christian Zionist elites if they were ever to build a Jewish state.
They finally found a sponsor in colonial Britain. In part, it was an
appetite for Biblical prophecy that guided the British cabinet in
approving the Balfour Declaration.
Today,
much teaching in Israel depends on unspoken, unexamined claims in the
Bible that Jews have a superior right to the land than Palestinians.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials know that nowadays Biblical arguments
hold little sway in much of the west. Outside Israel such claims play
well only with evangelicals, mostly in the US, and have therefore been
deployed selectively, targeted chiefly at US President Donald Trump’s
base. For the rest of us, the Biblical rationale is quietly set aside.
White man’s burden
The
second justification, frequently resorted to in the early years of the
Zionist project, was a fully fledged colonial one, and closely tied to
ideas about a superior Judeo-Christian civilisation.
Colonialism
assumed that white westerners were a biologically separate race that
had to assume responsibility for taming and civilising the savage nature
of inferior peoples around the planet. These inferior beings were
treated like children – seen as impulsive, backward, even
self-destructive. They needed a role model in the white man whose job
was to discipline them, re-educate them and impose order. The white man
was compensated for the heavy burden he had to shoulder by awarding
himself the right to plunder the savage people’s resources. In any case,
it was assumed, these barbarians were incapable of managing their
affairs or putting their own resources to any good use.
If
all this sounds improbably racist, remember that Trump right now is
proposing a variation of the same idea: Mexicans must pay for the wall
that keeps them out of a white America, even as US corporations continue
to exploit cheap Mexican labour; and ungrateful Iraqis are threatened with being made to pay for the soldiers that invaded their country and the US military bases that oversee their occupation.
Liberals
are no less averse to colonial ideas. The white man’s burden underpins
the “humanitarian intervention” project and the related, endless “war on
terror”. It has been easy to paint other states and their peoples
negatively as they continue to reel from centuries of colonial
interference – the theft of resources, the imposition of artificial
borders that stoke internal, tribal conflict, and western support for
local dictators and strongmen.
Developing
states have also struggled to prosper in a world dominated by western
colonial institutions, whether NATO, the World Bank, the IMF or the UN
Security Council. Doomed to failure by the very rules rigged to ensure
the western powers alone prosper, developing states find their
dysfunctional or authoritarian politics turned against them, used to
justify continuing invasion, plunder and control of their resources by
the west.
‘Death to the Arabs’
Whatever
Zionism claims, Israel was not an antidote to this “white man’s burden”
ideology. It was an extension of it. Much of Europe may have been
deeply racist towards Jews, but Europe’s Jews were usually viewed as
higher in the racial hierarchy than black, brown or yellow people.
Typically Jews were despised or feared by antisemites not because they
were seen as backward or primitive but because they were presented as
too clever, or as manipulative, secretive and untrustworthy.
The
Zionist movement sought to exploit this racism. Its founders, white
European Jews, impressed on potential sponsors their ability to help
colonise the Middle East on behalf of the European powers. After the
Balfour Declaration was issued, the British government put the Colonial
Office in charge of shaping a Jewish “home” in Palestine.
An
indication of the degree to which European ideas of racial categories
polluted the thinking of the early Zionist movement can be gauged by the
treatment of the Mizrahim – Jews from neighbouring Arab states who
arrived in the wake of Israel’s creation.
The
Ashkenazi (European) Jews who founded Israel had no interest in these
Jews until the destruction of large parts of European Jewry in the Nazi
death camps. Then the Mizrahim were needed to bolster Jewish demographic
numbers against the Palestinians. Founding father David Ben Gurion was disparaging of the Mizrahim, terming them “human dust”. There were vigorous debates
inside the Israeli army about whether the supposedly inferior, backward
Arab Jews could ever have their savage natures tamed sufficiently to
serve usefully as soldiers.
Israel
launched an aggressive campaign to de-Arabise the children of these
Jews – so successfully that today, even though Mizrahim constitute half
of Israel’s Jewish population, less than 1% of Israeli Jews can read a
book in Arabic. So complete has their re-education been that Mizrahi
supporters of the Beitar Jerusalem football club lead chants of “Death to the Arabs” at the ground, apparently unaware that their grandparents were Arab in every sense of the word.
Virus of hatred?
Again,
Israel and its western allies understand that few observers will accept
overtly colonial-style justifications for Israel’s creation, except of
the vague, war-on-terror kind. Such arguments run counter to the spirit
of the times. Nowadays western elites prefer to pay lip service to
identity politics, intersectionality, native rights – at least if they
can be used to provide cover for white privilege and to disrupt class
solidarity.
Israel
has proven particularly adept at inverting and weaponising this form of
identity politics. Now deprived of traditional Biblical and colonial
rationales, Israel has been left with only one palatable argument to
justify its crimes against Palestinians. A Jewish state is supposedly
needed as inoculation against a global plague of antisemitism. Israel,
it claims, is a vital sanctuary to protect Jews from inevitable future
Holocausts.
Palestinians
are not just collateral damage of the European project to create a
Jewish “home”. They are also presented as a new breed of antisemite –
their anger supposedly driven by irrational, inexplicable hatred – that
Jews need protecting from. In Israel, roles of oppressor and victim have
been reversed.
Israel
is only too keen to extend the accusation of antisemitism to any
western critic who champions the Palestinian cause. In fact, it has gone
much further. It argues that, whether consciously or not, all non-Jews harbour
the virus of antisemitism. Other Holocausts have been averted only
because nuclear-armed Israel behaves like “a mad dog, too dangerous to
bother”, as Israel’s most famous military chief of staff, Moshe Dayan,
once declared. Israel is designed as a garrison state for its Jews, and
an impregnable bolt-hole in time of trouble for any Jews who foolishly –
Israeli leaders imply – have not understood that they face another Holocaust outside Israel.
White European racism
This
is the self-rationalising appeal of antisemitism for Israel. But it has
proved the perfect weapon too for western elites who wish to besmirch
their opponents’ arguments, as Corbyn, Labour’s outgoing leader, found
to his cost. Just as the Zionist movement and its Jewish state project
were once the favoured vehicle for spreading British colonial influence
in the Middle East, today Israel is the favoured vehicle for impugning
the motives of those who criticise western imperialism or advocate for
political alternatives to capitalism, such as socialism.
Few
outside Israel understand the implications of the mischievous,
self-serving antisemitism rationale crafted long ago by Israel and now
embraced by western officials. It assumes that antisemitism is a virus
present in all non-Jews, even if often lies dormant. Non-Jews must
remain vigilant to prevent it reviving and infecting their thinking.
This
was at the heart of the claims against the British Labour party.
So-called “extreme leftists” like Corbyn and his supporters, so the
argument goes, were so sure of their anti-racism credentials that they
dropped their guard. Largely free of a fear of immigrants and non-white
populations, they mixed with British Muslims and Arabs whose attitudes
and ideas were easily passed on. Arab and Muslim resentment towards
Israel – again, presented as inexplicable – supposedly provided fertile
soil for the growth of antisemitism on the left and in Corbyn’s Labour
party.
Guerin’s
mistake was to hint, even if briefly and vaguely, in her report at a
deeper, even more discomforting recent history of European white racism
that not only fuelled the Holocaust but also sponsored the dispossession
of the Palestinians of their homeland to make room for a Jewish state.
The
connecting thread of that story is not antisemitism. It is white
European racism. And the fact that Israel and its supporters have signed
up as cheerleaders for that kind of racism makes it no less white and
no less racist.
*
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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/
Jonathan Cook
won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Copyright © Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2020
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