The New Dark Age

George Anthony explains the murderous Israeli strategy

Joining the Young Communist League in Hackney during 1949 wasn’t too difficult: the Cold War, initiated by Truman and Churchill at Fulton in March 1946 hadn’t yet sunk into the Hackney psyche.

Indeed, there were 1,500 members of the Communist Party in the borough, and three Communist councillors on the Hackney Borough Council.

These impressive figures were due to the anti-fascist struggle waged against Mosley Fascism amongst the large Jewish community and led by the Communist Party.

Zionism, as represented by the Hashomair Hatsair in the area was not considered a force of any significance. Indeed Zionism was seen as a diversion in that struggle against reaction.

Furthermore the Soviet Union’s recognition of Israel during that period was hailed as a progressive move and revenge for the horrors of the holocaust.

Books like John Hersey’s The Wall, on the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, and Howard’s Fast’s My Glorious Brothers, on the siege at Masada and the mass suicide, following the Roman assault, was in the lexicon of required reading about anti-Semitism throughout history.

In retrospect, through the lens of present day Gaza, this was a naive view of the deadly forces at work in the Jewish community. And the debate with Hashomair Hatsair on whether the Jews are a nation or a religion, academic sixty years ago, made a deadly impact in the Middle East at the expense of the Arab peoples.

Peter Ustinov described the Holocaust as a curse fallen finally on the Arab peoples. With Zionism the tool that motivates the world wide Jewish community and persuades them that the Arab peoples are the untermensch [literally under people] that they once were, when the Nazis – Kaltenbrunner, of Nuremburg infamy, compared Jews with rats – shovelled them into the Auschwitz furnaces.

In the Islip Newsletter of November 2000, I revealed the history of Zionism and Israel, which exposed the thinking that has now produced the slaughter at Gaza; in the following extract-

“The Jews are not a nation”, prominent French writer Philippe de Saint Robert wrote in 1970, that “From Herzel to Ben Gurion, the founders and realisers of Zionism were not believers; they were the conscious and organised initiators of an entirely political enterprise which, prior to clinging to British imperialism, did not fail to offer its services to Kaiser Wilhelm II.”

There it is, Zionism was never about religion but a conspiracy to create a gendarme state amongst the ‘unreliable’ indigenous Middle East states and to protect oil interests. This has been proclaimed consistently since the official foundation of the World Zionist Organisation in August 1897. Theodore Herzel writing to Cecil Rhodes, said, ‘I believe that the Zionist idea…is a colonial..idea’. That the Zionist programme in Palestine should ‘form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia’ and be ‘an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’.

The Balfour Declaration of November 2nd 1917, made just a few days before the October Socialist Revolution, was an agreement to form in due time, a ‘Jewish national home’. To free the British Government from the commitment (made to the Arabs by T.E.Lawrence to motivate the Arab nations to fight Turkey), and make Palestine into an Arab state.

In 1920, while Churchill was Secretary for War and Air, he wrote that ‘Zionism was the answer to international communism and that Zionism must therefore win the soul of the Jewish people.’

General Patrick Hurley told President Roosevelt in May 1943: ‘the Zionists envisage Jewish leadership for the whole Middle East in the fields of economic development and control’. In 1945, the US Senator Edwin C. Johnson said, ‘a Jewish Palestine is needed as an anchor and bulwark in the Middle East’.

In 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir explained that ‘Israel is really a safeguard for the maintenance of American interests in the area and the first line of defence for American interests in the Mediterranean basin’. A former Israeli Minister of Defence Ezer Weizman went further, ‘Washington doesn’t need to ask us for bases; without being asked Israel will give the United States all it requires’.

Hannah Arendt the U.S political commentator, wrote that Adolf Eichmann despised the Assimilationists; that Orthodox Jews bored him, but he loved the Zionists because they were ‘idealists’’ like him. The fathers of Zionism used anti-Semitism to recruit to Israel. In 1952, the editor of the social Zionist newspaper Davar wrote, ‘If I had the power and I have the will, I would select a score of young men, intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with the desire to help redeem Jews, I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague Jews with anti-Semitic slogans, such as, ‘Bloody Jew, Jew- go to Palestine’.

They also made it clear that to make room for these would-be immigrants, the Arabs would have to be banished. In 1973, Chief of the Israeli General Staff Moyshe Dayan said. ‘Zionism is being realised at the expense of the Arabs’. Sentiments echoed by former Prime Minister Menachin Begin, ‘You should never be kind to the Arabs that we may undermine the so-called Arab culture on whose ruins we shall build a civilisation of our own’.

Dr David Hacohen, a prominent member of the social-Zionist Labour Party, told Tory MP R.J. Maxwell Hyslop, The Times November 28th 1975, ‘The Arabs are not human beings. They are not people, they are Arabs’.

In 1919 Zionist leader, Nalnun Sokolow had written, ‘Absolute purity does not exist, but relatively the Jews are doubtless the purest race among civilised nations’. David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli head of government declared in 1957 that “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”.

Now the people of Gaza and indeed of Israel have reaped the whirlwind of these reactionary ideas. Millions throughout the world have engaged in unprecedented protests at the killing of innocent women and children by a highly developed war machine operated by young men and woman, brainwashed into believing they are killing people who are less than human beings.

Unfortunately for them, their government has been taken aback by the world’s rejection of this benighted view, and that this response is held right across the spectrum of opinion, from left to right, except in Israel and the United States. So much so that the recent United Nations Security Council, unanimously called for an immediate ceasefire. But, as with all previous resolutions, rejected by Israel*.

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* Israel and the U.S. engaged in a rare and uncharacteristic public spat Tuesday over events leading to the U.S. abstention in last Thursday’s U.N. Security Council resolution vote on the Gaza crisis.

Olmert said he had called Bush and interrupted a lecture he was giving in Philadelphia to ensure that the U.S. not vote for the resolution.

“I said: ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’“ “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

According to Olmert, he told Bush that the U.S. should not vote for the resolution, and Bush then directed Rice to abstain.

“She was left pretty embarrassed,” Olmert said.