Opinion Editorials, January 2017

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Anti-Semitic Zionists of the Coming Trump Administration  By Uri Avnery Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, January 4, 2017

Anti-Semitic Zionists
 
WHAT REALLY got me was the applause.
 
There, they were sitting at the round table, the representatives of the entire world, applauding their own handiwork, the resolution they had just adopted unanimously. The Security Council, like the Knesset, is not used to applause or any other spontaneous outbursts. And yet they clapped their hands like children who had just received their Christmas gift.
 
(It was indeed a day before Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah, a coincidence that happens once in decades, since the Christians use the solar calendar and the Jews still use a modified lunar calendar.)
 
The delegates were deliriously happy. They had just achieved something that had eluded them for many years: the condemnation of a blatant breach of international law by the government of Israel.
 
Consecutive presidents of the US had used their anachronistic veto power to prevent the UN doing its duty. Now, President Barak Obama, at the very end of his presidency, dared to challenge the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, a person he detests with all his heart.
 
And so, after years of frustration, the highest international body could adopt a resolution on Israel according to its convictions. No wonder they behaved like schoolchildren let out for vacation. A vacation that may, alas, prove to be short.
 
ON THE face of it, the joy was exaggerated. The resolution has almost no practical meaning. It has no teeth. Netanyahu could use the old oriental adage: "The dogs bark and the caravan moves on."
 
But Netanyahu's immediate reaction was very different. He acted like a wounded animal: running berserk, thrashing around, biting everyone in reach.
 
Some of his reactions bordered on the ridiculous. He could have belittled the resolution and made fun of it, as Israeli leaders have done many times before. Instead he recalled his ambassadors from Senegal and New Zealand (traditionally friendly nations), canceled visits of foreign statesmen, called in foreign ambassadors for a dressing-down on Christmas day,  threw around insults and especially besmirched President Obama.
 
This was obviously a stupid thing to do. The President still has 21 days to go, 21 long days in which to hurt Netanyahu. He could, for example, allow the passage of an irrevocable UN resolution to recognize the State of Palestine as a full member of the UN. At the moment, all of official Israel is in a state of panic in anticipation of such a move.
 
If Netanyahu had read Machiavelli, he would have known that you do not challenge a lion, unless you are able to kill him. Especially, I would add, a lion you have insulted and wounded many times before. Even lions do sometimes get angry.
 
But Netanyahu's behavior may not be as stupid as it looks. Actually, it may be quite clever. Depends on his aim.
 
As a diplomatic strategy, it is disastrous. But as a strategy to win elections, it is quite sensible. Here is the great hero, the new King David, fighting for his people, facing down the entire world. Is there anyone in Israel who can compare with him?
 
IN THE bad old days of Golda Meir, one of the Israeli army's entertainment bands sang a jolly song which started with the words: "The whole world is against us / But we don't give a damn…" The band danced around to the tune.
 
For some reason, Jews derive satisfaction from a world-wide condemnation. It affirms what we have known all the time: that all the nations of the world hate us. It shows how special and superior we are. It has nothing to do with our own behavior, God forbid. It is just pure anti-Semitism.
 
Netanyahu is out-Golda-ing Golda. The old lady now looks down on him from heaven (or up to him from elsewhere?) with envy.
 
ZIONISM WAS supposed to liberate Israel from these old Jewish complexes. We were supposed to become a normal nation, Israelis instead of "exile" Jews, admired by other nations. Seems we have not quite succeeded.
 
But there is a great hope. Actually, a giant hope. It has a name: Donald Trump.
 
He has already tweeted that after he assumes power, everything regarding the UN will change.
 
But will it? Does anyone – including himself – really know what he has in mind? Can Netanyahu be quite sure?
 
True, he is sending a rabid Jewish-American ultra-right Zionist as his ambassador to Tel Aviv (or to Jerusalem, we shall see.) A person so right-wing that he makes Netanyahu himself almost look like a leftist.
 
But at the same time Trump has appointed as his closest assistant a radical white racist with full anti-Semitic credentials.
 
Perhaps, as some believe, it depends entirely on Trump's moods. Who knows what his mood will be on the morning of the first important UN vote on Israel? Will he be Trump the Zionist or Trump the anti-Semite?
 
ACTUALLY, HE can be both. No problem, really.
 
The avowed aim of Zionism is to ingather all the Jews in the world in the Jewish State. The avowed aim of the anti-Semites is to expel the Jews from all their countries. Both sides want the same. No conflict.
 
Theodor Herzl, the Founding Father of Zionism, recognized this right from the beginning. He went to Czarist Russia, which was governed by anti-Semites, and offered a deal: we take the Jews off your hands, you help us to convince them to leave. That was  in the heyday of the murderous pogroms. But the Jews who left Russia went en masse to America, very few to Ottoman-ruled Palestine.
 
This was not a unique chapter. Throughout Zionist history, many attempts have been made to enlist anti-Semites to help in the implementation of the Zionist project.
 
Even before the Zionist movement was born, American and British evangelists preached the ingathering of the Jewish exiles in the holy land. They may have been Herzl’s inspiration. However, this message of redemption for the Jews had a secret clause. The return of the Jews to Palestine would allow for the second coming of Christ. But then, the Jews would convert to Christianity. Those who refused would be annihilated.  
 
In 1939, when the Nazi danger became obvious, the extreme Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky called for a meeting of his followers in Poland. The leaders of the Irgun underground in Palestine attended. One of them was Abraham Stern, whose nom de guerre was Ya'ir.
 
The meeting decided to approach the anti-Semitic commanders of the Polish army and offer them a deal: you arm and train young Polish Jews, and we shall liberate Palestine and transport the Polish Jews there. The officers agreed and training camps were set up in Poland. World War II put an end to the plan.
 
With the outbreak of the war, Jabotinsky, an ardent Anglophile in spite of everything, ordered the Irgun to stop all such actions and cooperate with the British. Stern proposed the opposite approach. His credo was: our enemy is Britain. The war provides us an opportunity to drive them out. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Adolf Hitler is an anti-Semite, but now he is our potential ally.
 
Stern's approach caused a split in the Irgun. A furious debate broke out in all the secret cells. As a 16-year old member, I took part. Being a refugee from Nazi Germany, I rejected Stern's thesis.
 
Stern created his own group (later called Lehi, Hebrew initials of Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the "Stern gang".) He sent an emissary to neutral Turkey, where he delivered the German ambassador a letter for "Mr. Hitler", offering cooperation. The Fuehrer did not reply. That was, of course, before the Holocaust.
 
Stern was caught by the British and "shot while trying to escape". When the war ended, and Soviet Russia became the enemy of Britain and the West, Stern's heirs approached Stalin and offered cooperation. Stalin, whose anti-Semitism was becoming more pronounced at the time, ignored the offer.
 
During the war, one of the architects of the Holocaust was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who was in charge of organizing the transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In Budapest he established contact with a group of Zionists, led by Israel Kastner, with whom he made a deal. As a good-will gesture he allowed him to send a few hundred Jews to neutral Switzerland.
 
Eichmann sent one member of the group, Yoel Brand, to Istanbul, with a crazy-looking offer to the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem: if the allies provided the Nazis with a thousand trucks, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews would be stopped.
 
Contrary to his instructions, Brand crossed the border into British-occupied Syria and was arrested by the British. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews - ten thousand a day – went on.
 
What was the Nazis' purpose in this bizarre affair? My own theory is that Heinrich Himmler was already determined to dethrone Hitler and make a separate peace with the Western allies. Eichmann served his plan to establish contact with the allies. As a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, Himmler was convinced that the Jews control the world.
 
Some time after the war, in Israeli captivity, Eichmann wrote down his memories. He stated that he believed that the Zionists were the "biologically positive" element of the Jewish race.
 
Mahmood Abbas, by the way, as a student at Moscow University, wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist cooperation.
 
CAN TRUMP'S assistants now include rabid Zionists and rabid anti-Semites at the same time?   
 
Of course they can.
 
This week, our far-right Minister of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman, condemned the French plan to convene (in Paris in a few days from now) a conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Israeli government fears that there, Secretary of State John Kerry will submit his detailed practical plan for a peace agreement, including the setting up of the State of Palestine. This plan would be adopted by the conference, and then by the UN Security Council.
 
This would be President Obama's parting shot. No veto.
 
(By the way, Kerry's plan is almost identical with a plan my friends and I published in 1957, 59 years ago, called "The Hebrew Manifesto".)
 
Blazing with fury, Lieberman compared this to the Dreyfus Affair. Some 120 years ago, a Jewish captain in the French army was falsely convicted of espionage for Germany and sent to Devil's Island off French Guiana. He was later acquitted. Zionist mythology has it that Theodor Herzl, then a Paris correspondent of a Viennese newspaper, was so shaken by the event that he was inspired with the Zionist idea.
 
The coming Paris conference, Lieberman asserted angrily, was the Dreyfus Affair all over again, only this time against the entire Jewish people.
 
But not to worry: Donald Trump and his anti-Semitic Zionists will put everything in order again.

David Friedman as the US ambassador in Israel: Don't Send Him!

By Uri Avnery

DONALD TRUMP has spat in my face.

Not only in my own face, but in the faces of at least half the Israeli population.

He has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman to the job of US ambassador in Israel.

This sounds like a bad joke. But it is brutal reality. It sets a precedent unknown in the annals of international diplomacy.

FIRST OF all, it is bad practice to appoint an ambassador to a country with which he has a deep personal connection. You don't send a Cuban-American Castro-hater to be the US ambassador in Havana. You don't send Kuomintang Chinese from Taiwan to be US ambassador in Beijing.

True, it is not the first time an American Jew has been appointed ambassador to Israel. There have been two or three, who could just as well have served as Israeli ambassadors to Washington. But they were far less opinionated than this specimen.

An ambassador serves as the eyes and ears of the home country in a foreign state. Among his tasks is providing his superiors in the foreign office with reliable, unbiased information, on which to base policy. The ideal ambassador is a cool observer, with no strong feelings towards the country of his mission, neither positive nor negative.

This description of a diplomat is the exact opposite of this particular individual.

It would have been far more reasonable to appoint David Friedman as Israeli ambassador to the United States. Unfortunately this post is already occupied - by another American Jew. Rumor has it that he was appointed by Netanyahu at the request of Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish casino magnate, who puts his money where his mouth is – in the far-far-far Israeli right.

But even this person is a leftist compared to David Friedman.

The name, of course, is a joke in itself. Friede in German means peace, but this David is the opposite of a Man of Peace. The Biblical David, by the way, was a man of war through and through, and for this reason God decreed that only his son, Solomon, would build the First Temple.

SO WHO is this man of peace? Since the news of his coming appointment became known, the internet has been flooded with quotations from his sayings. All of them incredible, each one more than the last.

One thing stands out even on first reading: when this future US ambassador says "we", he means "we Israelis". "we true Israelis", "we Israeli patriots". The territory of Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan river (at least) is "our country".

Friedman does not identify with all Israelis. He seems to think that most of us are blind, imbeciles, defeatists. or worse - traitors. This would set a world record: most Israelis, it appears, are traitors.

So who does Friedman really identify with? A representative sample of his utterances make this quite clear: he considers himself to belong to about 5% of the Israeli population: the settlers and the extreme Right.

HERE ARE some of his outstanding opinions;

• The Arab citizens of Israel, some 21% percent of the population, should be stripped of their citizenship. Rather like stripping all African-Americans of their US citizenship.

• There is no "Two-State Solution". Even mentioning such a possibility verges on treason. (Since I have been accused of having been the first to voice this solution in 1949, this is more spit I have to wipe from my face.)

• No settler must be allowed to be removed from his "home", even if this "home" is located on the private property of Arab farmers.

• In Greater Israel, from the sea to the river, Jews constitute a majority of 65%. This is a blatant lie: In this territory, including the Gaza Strip, the Arabs already constitute a majority.

• Future President Trump should be encouraged to dismiss all State Department personnel who advocate the Two-State Solution.

• Palestinians are corrupt.

• President Barak Obama is a "blatant antisemite".

• Bashar al-Assad and Binyamin Netanyahu should be friends. Probably including Vladimir Putin - a winsome trio, Indeed.

• We need a World War against Islamic anti-Semitism.

• American and Israeli Jews who support the Israeli peace camp are worse than Kapos. (Kapo, short for Kamp-Polizei, or "camp police", were camp inmates enlisted by the Nazis to uphold order in the death-camps, until they themselves were put to death.) This applies specifically to the mild and inoffensive "J Street" organization.

It also, of course, includes me.

IF YOU were inclined to laugh out loud at some of these definitions, don't. This is no laughing matter.

David Friedman is a serious person. He is a famous bankruptcy lawyer. But he is not being sent here to deal with the bankruptcy of the Netanyahu regime. On the contrary, he is sent to facilitate the setting up of an Israel government in which Netanyahu would constitute the extreme left. And this is not even an exaggeration.

Since 1967, the Israeli peace camp has prayed for the US to save Israel from itself. Every new president has been greeted with high hopes. Here is the man who will compel the government of Israel to give up the Palestinian territories and make peace with the Palestinians and the entire Arab world.

President Obama was only the last in line. Intelligent, good-looking, a rousing orator, full of noble intentions. But the results, as far as we are concerned, were nil. Yet now we wish that he had a third term.

I was always skeptical of this approach. Why would a US president stick his neck out to save Israel from itself, if the Israelis themselves are too lazy or cowardly to do so themselves?

(I have already mentioned lately that once, at an international conference, I accused the Spanish and European statesman, Miguel Moratinos, of failing to do so. He answered angrily that it was not his duty to save us, that it was our duty to save ourselves. I could not but agree in my heart.)

I have long ago given up any hope that the American administration will assist us in making a historic peace with the Palestinian people and in trading the occupied territories for peace. We shall have to do so ourselves. There is no other solution. The alternative so-called "one state solution" promises civil war for generations to come.

Anyone who is not blinded by ultra-nationalism and/or messianic fervor must surely see that. It is so simple.

THE CONQUEST of the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967 plunged Israel into a delirium that prevents us even today from listening to reason. The US, for its own reasons, has encouraged Israel to continue on this course.

President-elect Trump is set to push Israel forwards with all his might – forwards towards its eventual disaster.

Some 2000 years ago a Jewish Rebel called Bar-Kokhba ("Son of the Stars") rose against almighty Rome. Intoxicated by some initial victories, he cried out to God: "Don't help us, but at least don't help our enemies!" God didn't listen, and the rebellion was crushed by the Romans. The Jewish population of Palestine never recovered, until recently.

I would cry out to Donald Trump: "If you don’t help us achieve peace, at least don't send us this sworn peace-wrecker."

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org.

editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org