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Equating Israel to Nazism

It is hardly likely that Barcelona city council communication service acted on an antisemite agenda to try and strip the Jews off their status as victims of the nazi genocide. It is rather obvious that they were not taking issue with anything to do with the Holocaust and WW2 and their focus was on the present conflict and the wrong done to the Palestinians.

Ideas and concepts are often expressed by propagandists and pedagogists through comparisons and there, nazism has been – and rightly so – the symbol of absolute evil for decades.

Almost every ideology has been equated or compared to nazism by their opponents (1). Few political leaders have been spared being cartooned with a Hitler-style haircut and moustachios even when there is no relevance to the Jewish or Palestinian questions as it is most often the case.

Even Zionist or Israeli politicians have had no qualms about playing such tricks, not only against the opponents of a Jewish state in Palestine as they frequently do but also in their inner quarrels. Was it not David Ben Gurion himself, the father of the Israeli state, routinely nicknaming his rival Jabotinsky as “Vladimir Hitler” or stating that “Begin undeniably belongs to the Hitlerian type”? (2)

There is sometimes a case for such paragons. Unfortunately it mostly comes out as base political insults, gross exaggerations which show up that the accusers are at their wits’ ends, unable to control their emotions and to put their views across efficiently.

Slandering any opponent as a nazi or a fascist has become so common as to carry the risk of trivialising what these regimes actually were or are today. Columnist Ronan Mullen concurs with this in an “Irish Examiner” article (3) where not once the conflict in Palestine is mentioned: “The Nazis are too often invoked to illustrate evil. You even have elements on the American left who compare George W Bush with Hitler, and who think of US foreign policy in terms of the greedy expansionism of the Third Reich. Such parallels are unfair and extreme.

And overuse dulls their effect. The Nazi pathology was probably unique, nothing quite like it having happened before or since. Even when justified, these comparisons may weaken our remembrance of the horrors of the Third Reich”.

Indeed the first thing that must come to our minds when nazism is evoked is industrialised mass murder. Careful political debaters and liable militants are then best advised to avoid such haphazard conducts and not to refer to nazism, fascism or likewise ideologies out of context. (4)

We must understand however that it is sometimes a difficult business. All racisms have in common the belief that not all “races” or human groups are equal or that some are “too many” and one oppression always resembles another.

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Equating Judaism to Zionism

Rahola’s whole point is an emotionally impactful protest against the paragon between Israel and nazism. The irony is that her address rests upon a confusion largely more faulty than the one she so vividly exposes. We are all accountable to some extent for the ideologies we may espouse but by no means are we liable for our birth in such or such community.

As we emphasize in our section of definitions dissociating Judaism and Zionism is about the first requirement for whoever wishes to understand the conflict in Palestine and act accordingly.

Judaism is an ancient religion and its derived culture whereas Zionism is a colonial ideology born in the 19^th century asserting that the Jews of all countries belong to one Jewish nation and that they have a right to a supremacist state in Palestine at the expense of the native Arab Palestinians. Zionism has been the official and compulsory doctrine of the State of Israel since 1948.

To bash or discriminate Jews for their religion, traditions or origin is a form of racism traditionally known as anti-Semitism whereas disapproving of Israeli policies and even active denial of the notion of a supremacist Jewish state to exist in Palestine is not only a right protected by freedom of speech: the present conflict makes it a duty.

The guilt for the frequent confusion between Judaism and Zionism lies mostly on the Zionists themselves. They have always endeavoured to make it believe that their ideology flows self-evidently from Jewish history. They have monopolised Jewish symbols - like the star of David or the seven-branch candle called Menorah - and other identity traits of Judaism such as the characters of the Bible, the Jewish tradition of scholarly excellence and obviously the victims of the Holocaust. This endeavour has been remarkably successful so far. As a matter of facts it is a widely spread notion that the Zionists are the saviours of the Jews and the state of Israel is their safe haven. The world has at last begun to understand that this gives them no right to deprive and oppress the Palestinians.

That is a good step forward but there is more to it than that. Not only Zionism and Judaism are not one and the same, Jewish interests do not by and large coincide with Zionist assumptions. It is a common notion that the Zionists are the saviours of the Jews. Actually the historical records show how they colluded and actively cooperated with the anti-Semites from the start and eventually betrayed the persecuted Jews facing extermination.

Of course we could back these words with some emotionally impactful facts as Pilar Rahola does. We will not: it would sound vindicative and frivolous: these events must be considered in their historical context as it can be achieved through some good reading in our website: “Zionism and the Jews”, chapter 6 from “The Hidden History of Zionism” by Ralph Schoenman.

We will add that the first crime against the victims of the holocaust is of course to deny that it did happen and only second to it is to desecrate their memory instrumentalising them as human shields for a colonial expansionist state and ideology.

Addressing the causes of the conflict.

Some readers might wonder if Rahola is a misguided ingenuous or a manipulative character. There is plenty of self-righteous indignation along the 50 pages or so that make up the collection of her articles about Palestine and Zionism. Now and again we may find witful observations about by-questions, mainly exposing the acritical idealisation of the Palestinian cause that she reports from some media. However not once does she tackle the core issues of the conflict. Not a word about the century-old Zionists’ coveting of a land inhabited for centuries by the Palestinian Arabs, not a word about mass ethnic cleansing and the refugees and their denied right of return and the ongoing dispossession and discrimination.

We at Palestina Resisteix never get tired of repeating again and again that apprehending the conflict requires:

Pilar Rahola fails miserably on these three accounts. Instead of intellectual rigour and honesty, she talks deceiptively and tries to con the readers into moral blackmail. Mistaking Zionism for Judaism is not innocuous: it paves the way for equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. Furthermore her boundless and often ludicrous gullibility towards the myths of Zionism – where hither and thither racism rears its ugly head - is a poor substitute for a sound historical approach.

Rights and wrongs.

Rahola’s article claims victory through a post data. The very next day after it was published in Catalan daily Avui, the photograph at stake combining the Jewish Star of David and the Nazi swastika was removed from the Barcelona city official website.

Barcelona city council’s campaign was skilfully attacked at its weakest point. It happens most of the time that good-hearted people indignant of the ordeals inflicted on the Palestinians are unable or unwilling to expose the real nature of the conflict and opt instead for a moral condemnation rather than for a political one and to appeal to emotions rather than to reason.

Only to focus on the humanitarian impacts of the conflict brings no inlight as to its cause and solution. That leads most often to an indecent “blood accountancy”. Both sides advertise their dead – preferrably children – as trophies and they are liable to ignore or minimise the other side’s casualties.

International law doctrine draws a clear divide between “ius ad bellum” – why wars are fought and on what grounds resort to force can be legitimate - and “ius in bello” – how wars should be fought and how to prevent excesses. It follows that excesses may be committed not only by the aggressor but also by the party holding the right case in the conflict.

Indeed my dear lady: this is a filthy squalid war which causes a great amount of suffering on Palestinians and Israelis alike. This is a real world and our feelings and emotions count for much less than our behaviours and acts. I would prefer a cleaner war and come to think of it, I would prefer no war at all. That will only happen when the core issues of the conflict are addressed and solved.

The very title of her article “in favour of peace” is flawed. To talk of peace orf course bestows a good conscience at a cheap fare but we all should work towards justice instead because peace will be the result of justice. For instance Rahola repeatedly blames the Palestinians and chiefly Arafat for the failure of the ‘90ies peace process ("la destrucció de la gran esperança d'Oslo"). It was doomed to failure for its contradiction and because it failed to address the roots of the conflict as it is explained in Isaías Barreñada’s article.

Flawed reasoning

It is not only that Pilar Rahola’s views are deficient for a lack of knowledge and understanding. Eager to parrot every myth of the Zionist propaganda, she takes leaves of her senses as it is shown through these two samples.

(6).

Faked neutrality

It is understandable that she wishes to appear moderate and sensible in large circulation newspapers addressed to the general public in reaction to articles or acts where Israel is shown at a disadvantage. However neutrality and equidistance play in the stronger’s hands and they are not a badge of objectivity but of a poor or distorted understanding of the conflict. Besides it is not even what Pilar Rahola truly thinks. She has no such reservations when she writes for no less than “Maguen David” magazine from Mexico, Organización Sionista de Uruguay or her book titled “Siding for Israel” and quotes references from characters such as Herzl, Weizmann, Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Begin, Netanyahu who dedicated their lives to the Zionist enterprise and denying the Palestinians’ rights to their homeland.

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What of the Palestinians?

Pilar Rahola concurs with that. She never envisions the Palestinians as a people in their own right but as a problem for the Zionist project: “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path” as Weizmann described them or she echoes the rewriting of history to make it fit the Zionist agenda: “A people who arrived massively to the deserts of Judea precisely because the Jews did” or Palestine reinvented as “a land without a people for a people without a land” or “a chunk of desert that nobody wanted”.

Sometimes it can get confuse: “without ancestral roots, lost in the magma of the Arab identity – the unreal myth of the very Palestinian people was concocted as a pretext for the Arab occupation”/Sense arrels ancestrals, perduda en el magma de la identitat àrab – el mite irreal mateix del poble palestí va ser inventat com a excusa per a l’ocupació àrab” (emphasis added). We find it hard to believe that she means that the Arabs are the occupants and we will leave her with the benefit of doubt.

Whatever it is, she does not realise that the cause of the conflict is the despossession of the Palestinians’ land by an alien colonial power. She believes instead that it is the obstinate refusal of this people to accept the criminal usurpation of their land and rights which she illustrates quoting wherever she can the fanatical racist Golda Meir "Peace will come when Palestinians love their children more than they hate Jews". In another subtler and fraudulous guise, this is tantamount to Jabotinsky’s metaphore of the Iron Wall which considers that peace may only come when the Palestinians concede defeat.

Neither the mischevious lip service to her very peculiar notion of the “Palestinian cause” should deceive us. “That is the reason why I write in favour of Israel, because a left that does not follow propaganda must exist, a left that embraces causes without killing others', a left that loves Palestine because it first understands and loves Israel” (emphasis added). Here we are: Zionism first, Palestinians next, if ever.

“Lies are a disservice to the Palestinian cause” is the conclusion of one of her many articles on the subject. We could not agree more: sticking to the truth is one of the foremost duties to which Palestina Resisteix is committed. Meanwhile we can observe that the praise of Zionism always goes along with mythology, bareface lies, moral blackmail, distortion and manipulation. Obviously, Pilar Rahola’s literature is no exception to the rule.

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NOTES:

(2) "Begin undeniably belongs to the Hitlerian type. He is a racist, ready to destroy all the Arabs in his dream of unification of Israel, prepared to resort to any means to realize this sacred goal (…) He can be accused of racism, but then one will have to put on trial the entire Zionist movement, which is founded on the principle of a purely Jewish entity in Palestine" David Ben Gurion in E.Haber. "Menahem Begin, the man and the legend." Delle Book. New York 1979, p. 385.

(3) www.irishexaminer.com/pport/web/opinion/Full_Story/did-sgN2EhBnhRXZIsg7IQHSmeYhNE.asp

(5) Nation is one thing and nationalism is another. In contrast with Zionism, some nationalist movements tend to manifest themselves in a more liberal fashion. Instead of hijacking the traditional symbols of their communities, they make new symbols to incarnate their specific political projects. Catalonia has two flags and Brittany has got two anthems. The “senyera” and the “Bro Gozh” represent the nations and all Catalans and Bretons of whatever political persuasions whereas the “estelada” and “Kan Bale” are restricted to the national independence cause.

(6) This flippant lack of seriousness and coherence is confirmed when Pilar Rahola in her own website offers texts written about herself by such extremist Zionist groups as UPJF (Union des Patrons et Professionels Juifs de France) where she is introduced as a former Member of Parliament for IRE (Izquierda Republicana Española) or PSE (Partido Socialista Español) without her adding so much as a footnote to put things right. What would her former voters think if they knew? Rahola used to be a Member of Parliament for Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and Partit per la Independència - a splint group from the former - and there is no such party as "Partido Socialista Español" perhaps confused for "Partido Socialista Obrero Español" presently in office. 

Warning: many quotes from Pilar Rahola’s articles in the foregoing are not the same as they appear in the poor English translations at her website www.pilarrahola.com. We have thought it would be fairer to rewrite them in intelligible English. In this we have guided ourselves on their Catalan or Spanish versions which we suppose to be the author’s original writing.