{"id":2573,"date":"2017-05-15T10:44:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T08:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2573"},"modified":"2017-05-16T00:22:12","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T22:22:12","slug":"israel-zionism-and-the-smearing-of-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2017-05-15\/israel-zionism-and-the-smearing-of-critics\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel, Zionism and the smearing of critics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Suarez has written an important history of early Zionism, State of Terror<\/a>, finding in British archives a wealth of evidence damaging to the Zionist cause. The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in European\u00a0governments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. That included at different times dealing with the Nazis and the Italian fascists.<\/p>\n

It is also worth remembering that British officials who aided the Zionist movement\u00a0were far from immune to\u00a0anti-semitism either. The Balfour Declaration, 100 old years this year, was Britain’s promise to the Zionists to help them create a “national home” at the expense of the Palestinian people. But as Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet at that time, realised, it\u00a0was also a very good way for Britain’s anti-semitic elites to rid themselves of a domestic Jewish population while also creating a colony-state\u00a0in the Middle East dependent on Britain.<\/p>\n

As Suarez’s books reveals in shocking detail, any means were seen as legitimate by the Zionists, including violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians, the British, and even fellow Jews, in their efforts to drive out the native population.\u00a0A lengthy extract<\/a> from Suarez’s book, published by Mondoweiss, gives a disconcerting taste of what the Zionists were prepared to do to win themselves someone else’s homeland.<\/p>\n

The single most deadly terror attack conducted by the Zionists in Palestine was not the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, as is commonly remembered. It was\u00a0“the Jewish Agency\u2019s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.”<\/p>\n

The Jewish Agency, the Zionists’ government-in-waiting in Palestine, wanted to foil British efforts to relocate to Mauritius\u00a0these Jewish refugees fleeing\u00a0Europe. For the Zionist leadership,\u00a0it was worth\u00a0killing Jews if it aided\u00a0the cause of\u00a0creating a Jewish state in Palestine. As Suarez concludes, the terror attack “was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.”<\/p>\n

Similar\u00a0uses of terror continued after Israel’s creation in 1948, part of\u00a0false-flag operations to drive Jews out of Arab lands as a way to bolster the\u00a0Jewish majority in the new state of Israel.<\/p>\n

Suarez also reminds us that before the rise of Hitler the Zionist movement was far from popular, even among most European Jews:<\/p>\n

most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto \u2013 and worse yet, to do so on other people\u2019s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people, as Zionism demanded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even after Hitler launched the Holocaust, most Jews fleeing Europe wanted to head to the new promised land of the United States, not a territory\u00a0unknown to them in a region, the Middle East, most would have associated with deserts and backwardness. But US\u00a0Zionists lobbied their own\u00a0officials ferociously to get\u00a0the doors closed to most of these Jews, forcing them to become Zionists in Palestine.<\/p>\n

In 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt\u2019s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs [displaced persons], most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt\u2019s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, \u201cthrown out of parlours and accused of treason\u201d \u2013 “treason”, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is archival history that has been intentionally forced\u00a0down the memory hole \u2013 by Zionist organisations, by Israel and by British officials \u2013 for very good reason. It risks reminding us that Israel emerged out of an unholy alliance between, on the one hand, British anti-semites and colonial officials and, on the other, Jewish ethnic supremacists who had adopted for themselves the ugly ideology of Europe’s racial nationalists.<\/p>\n

US intelligence officials in the Middle East, points out Suarez, understood the roots of Zionist ideology.\u00a0In a report in 1943, they concluded that Zionism in Palestine was\u00a0“a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism”.<\/p>\n

The tactics of the Zionist leadership\u00a0haven’t much changed even now that their\u00a0state, Israel, has been achieved. Today, they don’t need to blow up hotels to get their way. Instead, its more fanatical devotees\u00a0use respectable kinds of terror to silence anyone, like Suarez, who wants to remind us of\u00a0this hidden history and help us understand how the past can cast\u00a0a very clear light on the present.<\/p>\n

I advise you to read this post<\/a> by him explaining how Zionist leaders in the UK, backed by media like the Daily Mail (a paper that has a long history of anti-semitism and that expressed sympathy for the Nazis back in the 1930s), have worked on a ruthless misinformation campaign to seek to discredit Suarez and prevent him from holding public events. The catalogue of cancelled speaking engagements\u00a0he documents is\u00a0truly\u00a0exasperating.<\/p>\n

Sadly, too few organisations emerge from this affair with honour. These confected smear campaigns still work because we let them. The Quakers, who have had a relatively good history of supporting pro-Palestinian activism, have let themselves down badly in twice bowing to such\u00a0intimidation.<\/p>\n

The goal of\u00a0Zionist activists like Jonathan Hoffman and Zionist organisations like the Board\u00a0of\u00a0Deputies of British Jews\u00a0is not just to silence Suarez. They want to pillory him\u00a0as a warning to anyone who might think to follow in his footsteps. Similar intimidation campaigns in the UK to stop criticism of Israel have been launched against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a raft of Labour activists who support Palestinian rights.<\/p>\n

Will any academic, young or old, dare to unearth more of these of official documents telling the real story of Israel’s creation? Would any of them want to suffer the smears and the irreparable damage to their professional reputations after seeing what has happened to Suarez.<\/p>\n

Similar campaigns against journalists (I have some personal experience of this!) ensure that they mostly keep their heads down too. They won’t be publicising or reviewing Suarez’s book.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0politicians, writers, thinkers, journalists and academics are all targeted if they dare to speak even a little truth about Israel or about Zionism, who is left with any prominence who can do so?<\/p>\n

Jonathan Hoffman and smear artists like him know the answer very well. Which is why they are not about to stop using misinformation and falsehoods<\/a> to blacken the name of anyone with integrity like Suarez who tries to\u00a0offer some illumination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Suarez has written an important history of early Zionism, State of Terror, finding in British archives a wealth of evidence damaging to the Zionist cause. The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in European\u00a0governments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,30],"class_list":{"0":"post-2573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-israel-lobby","8":"tag-zionism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}