Lecture by Joachim Martillo before New Jersey Solidaity
New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 3, 2002

The Failure of Jewish Studies in America[1]

Zionism is the movement to make Palestine the site of a nation-state for Jews. It can also be the ideology associated with the movement. A Zionist supports the goals of Zionism. The preceding definitions represent a plethora of questions far more than they provide any sort of explanation, for one must ask in response the following.

The academic field of Jewish Studies or Judaica should provide answers, reasonable analysis or the tools by which an educated person might be able to address the questions himself. Unfortunately, this field supplies only propaganda or poor scholarship from the study of the ancient Middle East to the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. The state of the academic disciplines associated with Judaica can be compared with the situation Eastern European historians faced after the fall of the Soviet Union when they suddenly had to write genuine history, and noone really knew how. While Judaicists are not ready to provide genuine scholarship, Eric Hobsbawm’s Budapest 1993 lecture to Eastern European students on the question of proper historiography indentifies a large part of the problem of Jewish Studies today.

The Bully Pulpit Betrayed

Bush is not alone in obscuring the basic facts. If practically all the main political, intellectual, journalistic and academic leaders were not misleading the public not merely on the core racist nature of Zionist ideology but also on practically all other major issues, the basic facts would be obvious.

Not only does Zionism control the discourse about Palestine and related issues in the USA; it also attempts to control the English language as used in the discussion.[9]

The Greco-Roman Anachronism: Jews or יהודים, ’Iουδαϊοι, Idaei

Biblical Israel[v] and the associated Greco-Roman Judean religion of a later period simply were not Jewish as we understand it today. When talking about the Greco-Roman period and earlier,[vi] one should never employ the term Jew, which belongs to a much later time frame. The correct word is Judean, from which Jew derives etymologically. The meaning of Judean in the Greco-Roman period is subject to much debate. I can only assume modern scholars simply do not have much command of classical idiomatic usage, for Judean had the same range of definitions as Roman had then and still has today. Generally, Roman could imply residence in Rome, descent from residents of Roman, practice of a religion or culture perceived as Roman[10] or citizenship in the Roman Empire. Likewise Judean could imply residence in Judea or descent from former residents of Judea. It could refer to people whose religious practices were connected[11] or originating with Judea as well as to the subjects of the King of Judea.[12]

Greco-Roman Judean religion has approximately the same connection to modern Rabbinic Judaism that ancient Roman religion, which was centered on the worship of Jupiter, has to modern Roman religion, which is generally called Roman Catholicism. People that observed Roman, Greek or Judean religious or cultic practices in ancient times rarely had ancestry that traced to Rome, Greece or Judea just as few Roman Catholics today are Roman in the sense of residing in Rome or of having ancestors that came from Rome.

Most Judeans in Greco-Roman times were Judean by religious practice, did not live in Judea or Palestine and were neither Judean nor Palestinian by ancestry or by residence. The majority of the population in Palestine was not Judean by religion although sometimes the people of Palestine or of Judea are described as Judean in a purely territorial sense even when they do not practice Judean religious ritual. Most cultic Judeans lived in Mesopotamia (i.e., Iraq) and were the descendants of non-Judean non-Palestinian populations that took up Judean cultic practices. Most Judeans of the Roman Empire were Greek-speaking and were the descendants of non-Judean non-Palestinian populations that practiced variants of Judean religion. The Romans did not expel Judeans from Palestine.

Modern Palestinians are descendants of ancient Roman period Judeans (in the territorial sense) or Palestinians of all religions. They were gradually Christianized and then Islamized like all other Middle East populations. Zionist racists, tribalists and propagandists in the media and in academic promote a false primordialist equation between modern Jews and ancient Judeans in order to justify or to legitimize the theft of Palestine from the native population by European settler colonists.[vii] Even though the primordialist argument is fundamentally nonsensical even if true (to wit, no one believes Vienna should be handed over to the Irish because the founders were Celts), such primordialism characterizes most Central and Eastern European nationalism of which Zionism is a particular extreme example. Radical German nationalists attempted to equate modern Germans with ancient Teutonic tribes even though modern Germans have probably more Celtic and Slavic ancestry than anything that can be considered Teutonic and even though we know that there was considerable Hunnish settlement of Bavaria. Polish nationalists had their own comparable version of primordialist nonsense and claimed to be reviving the Medieval Rzeczpospolita (Republic) while extremist Rumanian nationalists try to equate modern Rumania with ancient Roman Dacia.

The implicit content of primodialist claims is the assertion that Jews, Germans, Poles or Rumanians as the extremist nationalists define them were there first and that their rights are superior to those of anyone else in the lands the nationalists claim. The counterfactual Zionist primordialist propaganda that pertains to Biblical and Greco-Roman times has tended to be most effective with the most ignorant and gullible of American fundamentalist Christians.

The Medieval Anachronism: Jews or יהודים, ’Iουδαϊοι, Idaei, اليهود

Despite the uninformed beliefs of most Christians and Jews, modern Rabbinic Judaism crystallizes in the 10th century C.E. thanks to the efforts of Saadya Gaon and other 10th century sages and emissaries from the Gaonic academies of Mesopotamia. From then on it becomes legitimate to use the term Jew in lieu of Judaean. This time period was a general age of theological consolidation for cultures derived from ancient Hellenism. Christian theology attained its final form in the Roman West and the Byzantine East with the exception of developments of the Protestant Reformation. The stimulus for such consolidation among Christians and Jews may have been the finalization of Islamic theology with the rejection of the doctrine of المُعْتَزِلَة (the Mu`tazilah).[13] We can only speculate why the Geonic form of Judean religion became dominant as modern Rabbinic Judaism, but there is evidence from Geniza studies that the Geonim were in communication with elite of the Khazar Turks, who seem to have converted en masse to Judean religion between the 8th and 9th centuries as they migrated westward from Central Asia into the Ukraine and then into the Balkans. The Khazar elite may have provided funding to the Geonic academies, whose form of Judean religion thus had a tremendous advantage over forms of Judean religion like modern Karaitism in the competition for the hearts and minds of adherents of Judean religion.

Modern Rabbinic Judaism could well be a product developed jointly by a collaboration of the Geonim and the Khazar Turks.[14] Even if not, modern Rabbinic Judaism is still properly understood as the youngest of the Abrahamic religions.[15] It originates in the Diaspora, and its natural environment is the Diaspora. The Zionist assertion of having returned (Rabbinic) Judaism to its native soil is about as anachronistic as a claim can be and serves as nationalistic propaganda that is most effective among Jews whose origins are Central and Eastern Europe.

Anachronism Upon Anachronism: יהודים, ’Iουδαϊοι, Idaei, اليهود

During and subsequent to the time period when communities practicing Judean and related rites became modern Rabbinic or modern Karaite Jews, there is no evidence of any migration from the Middle East or N. Africa to medieval Central or Eastern Europe except for a small migration into France from Egypt and N. Africa during the late 12th and early 13th century and another migration into Hungary during the 100 year occupation by the Ottoman Empire that ends in the middle 16th century.

Figure 2 The migrations of Ashkenazim in Central and Eastern Europe.

All archeological, historical, ethnographic, linguistic and textual evidence available to us is consistent with the assumption that Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, most of whom later came to be known as Ashkenazim, have practically no ancestry from the ancient Palestinian Judean communities of the Greco-Roman period or earlier.[16] Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were an indigenous population whose Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, Celtic and Romanic ancestors assumed some form of Judean cultic practices long ago and then were subsequently Judaicized to Rabbic Judaism like almost all populations that practiced some form of the ancient Judean religious rites.[17]

At first only Jews in the region bounded by the Rhine, Danube and Elbe called themselves Ashkenazim (viz Figure 3). There is a good possibility that many early Judean-rite immigrants to this region came from the Turkic Khazar Empire, for the time frame of the founding of the Ashkenazi communities in German territories corresponds roughly to a period of increasing practice of Judean rituals within the Khazar Empire and continuing migration of Eastern populations westward. There is also considerable archeological evidence of western migration of refugees when the Empire finally dissolved and was overrun.[18]

Ashkenazi is a Hellenistic Judean Hebrew-Aramaic term for Scythian (also known as Ashguzai), Turk, Phryigians, Mysians and Ascanians. Geographically, the term is associated with Southern Russia, Western Turkey and parts of the Balkans. During the period of the Khazar Empire, Khazars that practiced Judean rites probably called themselves Ashkenazim because of this traditional terminology. Khazar immigrants to Central Europe could have joined already existing pre-Ashkenazi communties of Celts and Germans that followed some form of Judean or related religion. Probably, Khazar immigrants, associated with the activities of Radanite merchants, dominated these communities economically, intellectually and culturally. As Central European populations that practiced pre-modern Judean cults were gradually Judaized to modern Rabbinic Judaism, they forgot their actual origins like many other European populations. When only memory remained of the name by which the dominant element described itself, all Central European Jews came to be known as Ashkenazim, and the Central European German speaking region became the original territory of Ashkenaz.

Before Eastern Europe became the eastern region of greater Ashkenaz, it was a major source of slaves during the Medieval period and was at first known as Canaan in Jewish writings because Hellenistic Judean Aramaic used Canaanite as a common term for slave just as most Medieval European languages and Medieval Arabic used some variant of the word Slav as the word for slave.[19]

There were some basic differences between Ashkenaz and Canaan simply because the Ashkenaz region was mostly Germanic linguistically while Canaan in the early period was mostly Slavic in terms of language, but the critical historical divergence between Central and Eastern Europe takes place in 1648.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended The Thirty Years War, had the effect of excluding religion as a cause for war in Western and Central Europe.

The Chmielnicki Rebellion results in a series of slaughters of Polish Roman Catholics, Polish Jews and Ukrainian Orthodox.[20] Relations among the three groups begin a long downward slide. Confessionalism, which is religious hatred without religious belief, takes root in Eastern Europe as a precursor to the development of modern ethnic identities.

Figure 3 from A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names by Alexander Beider

The short-term consequences of Chmielnicki Rebellion included the absorption of Poland and the Ukraine into the empires of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Russian Romanovs while Jewish Canaan completed its merger into Ashkenaz. As a result, Eastern European Jews finished the linguistic shift from derivatives of West Yiddish and from Slavic (as well as possibly Turkic, Romanic or Yavanic) languages to East Yiddish, which is basically a Germanoslavic creole or fusion language. Nowadays, practically all Jews whose origins lie in Central and Eastern Europe are considered Ashkenazim.[21]

In the long-range the effects of the Treaty of Westphalia and the Chmielnicki Rebellion defined the 19th century evolution of modern nationalism, which demanded that the nation and the state must be congruent.

The pattern of secularity and confessionalism among Central and Eastern Europeans held true even during Nazi persecultions of European Jews. Nazi Germans claimed to abuse Jews on strictly racial groups while Eastern European collaborators generally showed strong confessional tendencies in their persecutions.

Obviously, modern Ashkenazi history no more takes place in a vacuum than Greco-Roman Judean history, but modern historiography of Ashkenazim is flawed not only by anachronism as Hobsbawm points out but by exceptionalism and omission. Exceptionalism is probably either Zionist or racist in origin. Omission is characteristic of all false and propaganda histories. Zionist historians have gotten away with this sort of intellectual dishonesty for far too long.

Exceptionalist histories of Ashkenazim avoid connecting Ashkenazi social, political, intellectual and economic history to the Central and Eastern European environments in which they lived. Exceptionalist history serves Zionist purposes because prejudiced historians and propagandist can avoid interpreting Zionist ideology and actions as part of the general tapestry of European aggression, imperialism and colonialism against the non-Western world. Instead such exceptionalist pseudohistorians can portray well-meaning Zionist settlers as merely reacting to groundless savagery and hostility according to the Zionist formula popularized by Herzl in Altneuland[22]. At the same time such exceptionalist histories are fundamentally racist because they follow a standard Judeophobic racist formual that Ashkenazim are non-Europeans that have no place in Europe.

In the non-exceptionalist history of the 17th and 18th century, Ashkenazim in Central and Eastern Europe faced the common issues related to modernization of traditional societies just like all other Central and Eastern Europeans. For the most part Ashkenazim selected one of three possible responses. The earliest and most commonly chosen reaction was Enlightenment (השכלה) and assimilation. Most Eastern European and practically all German and Austrian Ashkenazim selected this path,[23] which was particularly easy for the latter group because there were no major ethnolinguistic destinctions between German-Austrian Ashkenazim and other German-speakers and because most German nationalists had no inclination to exclude German Ashkenazim from German ethnicity or identity until the later part of the 19th century.[24] German Ashkenazim were Germans just like German Protestants or German Roman Catholics, and Ashkenazi identity in Germany was purely religious.

Somewhat later Yiddishism developed as a particularly Eastern European populist Ashkenazi response to modernization.[25] Yiddishism developed into several distinct movements that sought Yiddish cultural autonomy in various forms. Yiddishism was an expression of the developing Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic identity that was distinct from Jewish religious identity and unprecedented in the history of Jewish religion since the 10th century. Zionism was primarily an even later development among a very small group of elitist Central and Eastern European Ashkenazi intellectuals that were estranged both from Jewish religion and from Eastern European Ashkenazi culture. Such Ashkenazi intellectuals are typically called non-Jewish Jews, but they are more correctly identified as non-Jewish Ashkenazim. The animosity between Yiddishists and Zionists was immense in practically every way (viz Figure 5).

Zionism like practically all other 19th century Eastern European nationalist movements makes its first appearance as a rerun and translation of Polish nationalist ideology into Ashkenazi terms. The Medieval Polish Rzeczpospolita (Republic) provides the archetype of the anachronistic mythological lost nation state that must be restored. Even though important Polish nationalists had proto-Zionist or Zionist beliefs and even canvassed the Polish Ashkenazi community for support of both Polish nationalism and also of Zionism, no history of Zionism mentions the connection of Polish nationalism with early Zionist thought while the standard histories like those of Walter Laqueur, Howard Sachar or Arthur Hertzberg dig up a long list of fairly implausible Jewish forerunners of Zionist ideas. This effort looks more like a dishonest attempt to establish the internal Jewish legitimacy of Zionism and to deny the connection with Polish nationalism than to provide historical illumination.

To find mention of the possible influence of Polish politics on Polish Jews, one must search outside the standard histories of Zionism or of Ashkenazim in texts of general European political history like Fire in the Minds of Men by James H. Billington[26] or in Polish language biographies and memoirs of Polish nationalist leaders. The absense of investigation of the Polish influence in the origins of Zionism may be symptomatic of the anti-Polish and anti-Slav prejudice of many historians that specialize in Jewish studies.

Polish nationalism is hardly the only Slavic influence or source for proto-Zionism or early Zionism. The influence of Russian culture is fairly obvious although hardly ever mentioned in the standard histories of Zionism. Czar Alexander II encouraged a very Palestine oriented form of Russian Orthodoxy especially in the 1870s and sponsored the pilgrimage of tens of thousands of Russians to Palestine. Shortly after the institution of this program the ציון חבת (Love of Zion) movement appears among Russian Jews. The development of Zionism among Russian Ashkenazim could be a symptom of the thoroughness of the Czarist Russianization program that had made Russian the primary language of most of the world’s Jews by 1905. The absense of discussion of the influence of Russian social, political and religious culture in the development of early Zionist thought suggests anti-Russian or anti-Slavic bias and a conscious distortion of the history of Zionism by historians associated with Jewish studies.

The Known Facts

There is no doubt that German, Austrian and Russian social, political and intellectual culture served as the main influence on the three primary leaders of Zionism from the 1890s through the first decades of the 20th century, for Herzl the journalist, Nordau the social critic and Жаботинский (Jabotinsky) the literateur were the most non-Jewish of Ashkenazim. Like most German, Austrian and Russian intellectuals of the fin de siécle, they were all anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, collectivist, anti-democratic and social Darwinist. Even though in their own minds they were very much members of the European elite and men of great personal achievement, they found themselves excluded from the highest ranks of German, Austrian and Russian society in a manner somewhat analogous to the treatment of Burakumin in Japan or Hakka in China.[27] For such cultured men espousing "primitive" Eastern European Ashkenazi Yiddishism was simply out of the question.

Instead, they redefined the Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group as the Pan-Judaic Jewish nation on Pan-German and Russian Pan-Slavic models.[29],[viii] Herzl was quite frank in his diary that German and Austrian Ashkenazim, who were not a Volk or Race in the Pan-German sense, would have to be shaped into a nation. Naturally, Herzl, who was developing a primordialist pan-Judaic fiction of ancient Jewish glory for Zionists, found inspiration in Wagner’s attempt to create a modern myth of a heroic German past for romantic nationalist pan-Germanists.[30]

Herzl’s pan-Judaic Zionism looks like a combination of the ideas of Western European and perhaps Russian imperialist colonialism[ix] with the pan-German ideology of the Austrian politician and racist anti-Semite Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who founded the Pan-German party, a direct ancestor of the Nazi party and who achieved the rank for which Herzl longed. Herzl’s newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, carried many stories about von Schönerer and his party.[x] A genuine historian that sought the inspiration and model for Herzl’s Zionism would probably investigate connections between Herzl and von Schönerer and not waste time on insignificant rabbis or Ashkenazi eccentrics like Moses Hess in a propagandistic effort to provide a Jewish lineage and legitimacy for Herzl’s ideas.

The origins of Nordau’s and Jabotinsky’s ideas come no less from the Austrian, German and Russian cultural milieu than Herzl’s. The nation, body and violence worship of the racist anti-Semite Turnvater Jahn, who founded the German nationalist gymnastic movement in the early 19th century, apparently had a strong influence on both Nordau and Jabotinsky[31]. Jabotinsky was fortunate in developing his form of Zionist ideology in the Russian culture millieu from whose models of gunpowder imperialism, colonialism and expansionism he could draw directly.

The fascination that racist anti-Semites held for the three patriarchs of Zionism is not a little bizarre but does make sense in terms of their personal belief systems and of their goals for European Ashkenazim. The attraction that anti-Semitic public personalities exerted over them is also not particularly hard to document even though it rarely appears in Zionist histories. Nordau had a particularly long-standing, somewhat twisted and probably sexual relationship with the rather notorious Russian anti-Semite Olga von Novikoff, to whom he dedicated his play The Right to Love.[32]

The Scary Story

Jabotinsky’s thought and behavior crosses the line from the peculiar and disconcerting to the scary. His writings of the naughts and teens were far more creative and innovative than either Herzl or Nordau. A lot of this material is either not translated or is badly translated from Russian to English or to Hebrew. "Сионизм и Палестина" ("Sionizm i Palestina" - Zionism and Palestine) in Еврейская Жизнь (Evreiskaia zhizn' - Hebrew Life), no. 2 (February 1904), p. 205, proclaims a very strong primordialist blood and soil form of nationalism.

[The] tie between Zionism and Zion is for us not only an ineradicably strong instinct, but also an empirically proven consequence of strictly positivist study (пробньи, законньи вывод строго-позитивного размышление -- probnyi, zakonnyi vyvod strogo-pozitivnogo razmyshlenie).[33]

Americans incorrectly view Nazism as a uniquely horrible movement that requires singularly evil political leaders. In reality Nazism is just a specific conglomeration of 19th century fin de siécle ideas. Nazism can occur over and over again if we fail to keep guard against it. The component ideas of Nazism suffused the intellectual milieu of Central and Eastern Europe. Jews and Non-Jews were equally likely to incorporate them into their Weltanschauungen.[35],[xi] The ideology of Sharon and his government, with which the USA is allied, is on the straight line of development from Jabotinsky’s abstract Nazism. If one understands Modern Israeli Hebrew and German, the similarity of political discourse in Israel and 1930s Germany is quite striking. Despite the portrayal in US media there is hardly any debate about transfer among Israeli Jewish politicians. Usually, the discussion focuses mostly on manner and on means.[xii]

Exceptionalism and Omission: A Fantasy Pretending to Be History

The disconnection between reality and American perception of Zionism directly relates to the Zionist control of the historical and political analysis taught in American universities. The indoctrination then percolates outward into primary and secondary school education as well as into the journalistic and popular media. Two examples can show some of the perniciousness of Zionist historiography. A conscientious college course whose topic related to Zionism might include readings from The Founding Myths of Israel by Zeev Sternhell or from Zionism and the Arabs 1882 - 1948, A Study of Ideology, by Yosef Gorny, for these two books are probably the best of Zionist historiography, and there is some internal evidence that at a conscious level both authors tried to transcend the mindset of Zionist propaganda and write genuine history even though they were mostly unsuccessful.

Zeev Sternhell

Sternhell is one of the leading experts on late 19th and early 20th European political movements of which Zionism is one example. The Founding Myths of Israel purports to be a genuine history of the development of Labor Zionist ideology even as it makes an internal Israeli political argument for a new civil nationalist form of Zionism. The political argument is mostly irrelevant to the topic of pre-state Zionist historiography while the actual concept that Sternhell advocates is oxymoronic. As an historian Sternhell made his reputation with several books and papers on the origin and development of fascist and nationalist socialist thought. In the historical framework that Sternhell has developed, nationalist socialism is a nationalist revision of Marxist socialism according to which the class struggle is transcended via national revival while fascism combines opposition to bourgeois democracy with extremist organic nationalism, nationalist socialism and state corporatism, which places industry and agriculture under the collective control of worker syndics or unions in coordination with the government.

The Founding Myths has some value in its discussion and analysis of Labor Zionist ideology, but for the most part, it tends consciously or unconcsiously to subtle Zionist propaganda and disinformation. Sternhell admits facts that are harmless or indisputable. He notes that the Zionist linguistic program is fairly typical of Eastern European nationalist political movments. He admits that the Labor Zionist ideologist Berl Katznelson plagiarized ideas from the Henri de Man, the leader of Belgian fascism. Sternhell even admits that the Zionist state is racist albeit somewhat cravenly, for he uses the German word völkisch instead of plain English.[36] Yet, The Founding Myths remains a unique example of Zionist exceptionalism, for Sternhell fails to apply to Labor Zionism the same intellectual apparatus by which he analyses fascist and nationalist socialist movements or ideologies in Neither Right nor Left and his other publications. Thus, Sternhell’s own historical analysis of Zionism is exceptionalist with regard to Sternhell’s own historical analysis outside Zionism.[37]

When readers have asked Sternhell to explain why Labor Zionism is not a fascist ideology, Sternhell simply lies. He claims that Labor Zionists were not anti-democratic. The main Labor Zionist ideologist Victor Arlosoroff did not conceal his anti-democratic political positions while Labor Zionists invariably opposed the creation of local democractic political structures in Palestine whenever the issue came up in discussions with the Mandatory government, and it is certainly impossible to call any movement democratic whose first act in achieving state power is the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the population. But Sternhell makes most of his argument by ommision, for he fails to place Zionism in the Eastern European context, where Fascist movements and ideologists under the influence of the myth of the ancient Polish Rzeczpospolita have generally preferred a formal democracy that concealed an undemocratic political military oligarchy to outright antidemocratic political forms and structures.

From the creation of the State of Israel through the 60s the oligarchic structure of the Israeli state has been obvious, for citizens were given the option of voting for party lists chosen by the parties. Later, the Zionist government has used more subtle means to discount the votes of non-Zionist elements of the population especially as the native proportion of the population has increased. In a genuine democracy, we would expect the government of the state to change as the demography of the state changes. In non-democratic states like Israel the political leadership develops a strategy to change the demography of the state[38] to maintain the power of political elite.

Yosef Gorny

Despite its problems Sternhell’s work has a lot of value, but Gorny’s has less. It is a measure of the quality of pre-State Zionist historiography that this text has become more or less the standard work from which Hebrew and English speakers learn this area of ideological history. Even Finkelstein cites him rather uncritically. Zionism and the Arabs embodies every questionable aspect of Zionist historiography. The least of its flaws is the use of ideological terminology in the presentation of an "alleged" history of ideological development. The book uses expressions like "return of Jews to Palestine" rather than "emigration of Ashkenazim to Palestine."

Gorny is a complete and utter historical exceptionalist. He is blind how Slavic racist the Zionist theory of relations with the native population is. The argument whether Palestinians[39] are a genuine nation show the typical logic by which Slavic nationalists deny minorities national or cultural rights. Extremist Slavic nationalists invariably casuistically describe people whose rights are to be denied as a народность (nationality) and not as a народ (nation).

Gorny unlike Sternhell is also blind how thoroughy German völkisch racist Zionist ideology about relations with the native population is. The argument whether Palestinians are a genuine people or defined only negatively in response to Zionism evinces the typical logic that German racists applied to Ashkenazim when they argued that Ashkenazim were a Gegenvolk (i.e., an anti-people) and not a genuine Volk (i.e., a people in the racial spiritual sense of German Romanticism)?

Gorny simply ignores the effects of the Nazi persecutions on Zionist ideology. When one reads Zionist literature of the 40s or often even earlier, one cannot help but notice that Palestinians had become surrogates in the thinking of many of the Palestine-resident Zionist leaders for all the supposed European persecutors of Ashkenazim in the false "pogrom and persecution" version of Ashkenazi history that Ashkenazim commonly believe. It is simply mind-boggling that the UN could propose in 1947 to place so many Arabs under the rule of people so likely to view them as reasonable targets of revenge for every real and imagined grievance against someone else.

Nevertheless, according to Gorny’s narrative Zionist leaders are invariably moderate and reasonable while Arab leaders are extreme, unreasonably and unwilling to negotiate. He omits to mention that Shakib Arslan as an agent al-Hussayni and later various Syrian Nationalists offered to facilitate the immigration of Ashkenazim into Arab countries if Zionists would renounce the goal of making Palestine a Jewish state. Arabs offered Ashkenazim more in the way of refuge than the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia or anyone else, but this fact is absent from practically all histories of the Pre-State Zionism[40] because it belies "the compelling necessity" argument for Zionism. Gorny dismisses pre-State Arab attempts to negotiate just as Barak did at Camp David. Like most Zionists Gorny does not permit the facts to interfere with his worldview.

Gorny includes the usual counterfactual nonsense that the rumor of the murder of an Arab boy by a Zionist settler immensely disturbed העם אחד (Ahad Haam, Asher Ginzburg[41]) even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazim were any less violent than other Eastern and Central Europeans. In Eastern Europe throughout the 19th century and 20th century, Ashkenazim took part in revolutionary and terrorist violence just like all other Eastern European ethnic groups. In Palestine during the teens Ashkenazi שומרים had no reluctance to use violence, terrorism and intimidation to claim property illegitimately or to deny Palestinians their legitimate non-title rights to land use.[42]

Many Ashkenazim served in WW1 on both sides. There is no reason to believe that demobilized young Ashkenazi males were any less violent than demobilized German, Austrian and Eastern European soldiers, who formed private militias.[43] The Yiddish novel, Steel and Iron by I.J. Singer, centers about such a tough former Jewish soldier. It is a great novel that portrays a very different reality than the Zionist anti-Diaspora ideology of passive and weak Diaspora Jews. Such Zionist anti-Diaspora attitudes represent genuine irrational anti-Semitism unlike the Palestinian anti-Zionist resistance, which is simply a normal reaction to murderous genocidal racism and theft.

Not only does Gorny ignore 19th and early 20th century history of Ashkenazim in Europe, he fails to contextualize the Zionist ideology of the relationship with native Palestinians in the framework of Eastern and Central European Orientalist discourse, particularly that which is associated with Russian imperialism and colonialism in Central Asia. Nowadays, scholars probably do not put the Prussian or Austrian policy of colonization, domination and Germanization in Eastern Europe in the same category as European colonialism and imperialism in the 3rd world, but in the 19th century the similarities were undeniable, and Ashkenazim were often in the position of local collaborators with the foreign Austrian or Prussian overlords. One could argue that Herzl’s Altneuland was a sort of personal advertisement of a would-be colonial surrogate population for an imperial motherland.

Because Germany and Austria had no imperial possessions, German Orientalism of the Ancient and Modern Middle East or India was generally accounted a subspecialty of Classics and therefore tended to relegate even modern Arabic cultures to a non-living status.[44] German Ashkenazi Zionists steeped in German Semitics had no problems in denying the national and human rights of the members of dead cultures. German Indology, which had a direct input into Nazi theories of Aryan superiority, probably also had indirect influence on Zionism through the idea of Umvolkung or population supplantation as it developed in extremist German nationalist discourse to justify the displacement of inferior races.

Gorny disregards completely this ideological framework, which first appears among Zionist ideologists during the naughts and the teens in discussions of the transfer or removal of Arabs. German Nationalists called such a process Umvolkung or population supplantation. Hitler’s Professors[xiii] by Max Weinreich describes in detail the Nazi Umvolkung program. Landeskunde or knowledge of country was the linchpin of this program, whose first step comprised dispatching academics and archeologists to find archeological evidence of ancient ancestors. The historical presence of ancient Teutons or the shedding of Germanic blood in a region would be verified to justify replacement of the current residents with German settlers. Thus, German academic Landeskunde was an intimate part of the racist German theory and practice of relations with subordinate non-Germans.

הארץ ידיעת (yedi`at ha’arets, a loan translation of Landeskunde) is the transference of racist German practices and theory to the Zionist context of relations with Palestinians. הארץ ידיעת provides the evidence for the claim of superior rights of Ashkenazim to Palestine as Zionist leaders like Jabotinsky claimed on "a strictly positivist basis." If Zionism had not been so murderous and genocidal, there would almost be something sad and pathetic that a population like Eastern Eruopean Ashkenazim would be so ashamed of their own history that they would deny their own heritage and attempt to claim or to steal the history and heritage of another people.

Unfortunately, in the case of Zionism conflicted Ashkenazi feelings about their genuine ancestry lead to massive brutality and heinous crimes. From appropriating the archeological and historical sites of Palestine,[45],[xiv] it was only a small step to stealing the property, expelling the population and destroying the evidence physical presence of the native population. הארץ ידיעת provides the basic ideological legitimization of Zionist expulsion of the native population of Palestine, which in current Israeli discourse is still the final solution to the Arab question within Zionism just as expulsion was the Nazi solution to the Jewish problem up to 1939.[xv]

הארץ ידיעת directly ties Zionist ideology to German racist and Nazi ideology of purifying the lands of Eastern Europe of non-Germans. Yet, there is no mention of הארץ ידיעת or Umvolkung in a book that claims to be a study of ideology but is like practically all pre-State Zionist historiography really a whitewashing of a fundamentally racist genocidal program of colonial aggression against an innocent and inoffensive Arab population. Such historiography makes it possible to portray crimes against humanity as a just and heroic endeavor in which Zionist Ashkenazim and their supporters should take pride.

The failings and distortions associated with the Zionist historiography, of which Sternhell and Gorny are in some sense the best examples, have obvious consequences and repercussions for American historical and political debate as well as the popular culture from which most Americans learn their history and develop their political choices.

…what people learned from … the writers of history books…

The excerpt in Figure 6 from a standard junior high school history textbook used in the Boston public school system shows how the Zionist control of historical discourse affects pre-college education. This item is hardly the worst example of questionable analysis contained in the book, but it is exceptionally pithy. Boston students do not learn history; they receive religious indoctrination and study Zionist legitimization narratives or myths.

This particular textbook is implicitly primordialist.[46] It does not explicitly say that modern Israeli Jews are descended from Ancient Jews or Israelites, but why would anyone reading the text assume otherwise? Even if modern Ashkenazim were the descendants of Greco-Roman natives of Judea - as we know they are not -- does it make sense for people to attempt to claim the lands where their ancestors might have lived thousands of years ago? The text does not address this question, but the Bush administration answered the question at Durban at the UN World Conference Against Racism where it argued that for the sake of progress and economic development claims for compensation for events from only 200 years ago must be stayed or allowed to lapse.[47]

… what people learned from … television programmes [and movies] …

The ill effects of Zionist control of the political and historical discourse hardly cease with pre-college education. Americans are constantly bombarded with false and racist depictions of the conflict in the Middle East by the popular media. No one should wonder why American political leaders consistently side with Zionists on the question of Palestine. The following list of American produced and directed films shows how much Hollywood has assimilated or absorbed Zionist myths, attitudes and beliefs into its products for dissemination into the American and world market. [49][xvii]

Moreover, the moment one expresses concern about the Zionist domination of American attitudes discourse one is accused of anti-Semitism. Yosef Gorny in his preface provides a useful, albeit primordialist, comment on this issue.

In other words, terms like anti-Semitism refer to a reality of the past not the present, are anachronistic and simply do not apply to the conflict over Palestine (viz Figure 7). It is a Pavlov trigger used to cause a reflex response instead of rational thought. On hearing the phase the hearer is supposed to think of poor oppressed Jews, who are being threatened with machine guns, instead of the current reality that consists of an ideologically racist Jewish state that is a criminal and of murderous European colonist settler soldiers that are engaged in on-going oppression, plunder and genocide against the native population of Palestine. When a university president like Lawrence Summers of Harvard use such tendentious, propagandistic and inappropriate terminology in a debate over Palestine, one must question his fitness to lead that university. A person that uses the term anti-Semitism in a debate about Palestine is simply intellectually dishonest. Such a person should be denied any position of political or educational responsibility.

What is to Be Done?

The evil that Zionist control of discourse represents in the USA is practically all encompassing. It starts with the miswriting of history in academia and spreads outwards. In America Jewish studies begs practically all questions of history and ethics on subjects even only remotely connected with Zionism. Zionist professors have practically ruined the whole concept of academic discourse in the USA

Nowadays there is little scholarship in the field of Judaica. Only subservience to Zionist interests remains. If genuine Jewish studies existed in the USA instead of a Zionist propaganda machine, the Palestine question would be a no-brainer. The USA would probably have kissed Israel goodbye long ago or bombed Israel into submission as it did Milošević. A US alliance with Zionism is a betrayal of ideals to which Americans are supposed to cling. To advocate or to support such an alliance is a betrayal of America. An American that supports or advocates this alliance is a traitor whether he is the President, who holds office by a judicial coup, or an ordinary citizen. The foreign policy course for the USA is obvious and presents one of the few cases where ethics and pragmatism are congruent. To switch sides and treat Israel as an enemy would win many friends and no significant enemies. Regime change first in Palestine first to overthrow Zionism and then to bring to justice Zionist war criminals or perpetrators of crimes against humanity would probably eliminate most opposition to military action against Saddam Hussein.

At the Local Level

Obviously, most of us do not have the resources to combat Zionism either at the national or university level, but parents in particular can play an important rôle. They have to be involved in politics at the community level because American Zionists already are disseminating propaganda and falsehood.

Parents must force textbooks like World History, Patterns of Interaction out of the school systems and coerce the publishers to present history that has some connection to reality. But parents cannot stop there. In many states Holocaust instruction is mandated. These courses are very bad. Usually, the course materials are prepared directly or indirectly by the State of Israel so that no genuine history is taught, and the classes focus on legitimization myths for Zionism. Such courses distract from the crimes that have been committed in the USA like slavery and the genocide of the Native American population. Even the name is bad. Wiesel used the word holocaust to refer to the Nazi murders of Jews to suggest that the deaths were burnt offerings to God to sanctify the creation of the State of Israel. As the vast majority of the murdered were non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, Wiesel’s nomenclature is offensive and insipid to say the least. The Yiddish word, חורבן (khurban), and the Hebrew word, שואה (sho’ah) are more appropriate, for they simply mean catastrophe like the نكبه (nakbah). All Holocaust studies must be coupled with study of the Nakbah and of the crimes of Zionism because according the normal pattern in human history, which we probably wish to teach children to avoid, victims turn into victimizers at the drop of a hat. The שואה and Zionism provide an illustrative example.

Anti-Zionist activism must go beyond the public schools. Arab Americans and any American committed to justice must punish local politicians whenever they espouse Zionism. Then maybe national politicians will get the message. I know that some Muslims have religious problems with political participation. When someone argues that a true Muslim should not participate in an infidel government, I respond that the US government is no more an infidel than a tank or a fighter plane. The government is just a big machine that can be put to any use if one is willing to make the effort to control or influence it. Anyone that is unwilling to vote or to participate simply concedes the power of that government machine to Zionists or other bad guys that are willing to put their money and attention to working the political system. To concede such power to such forces is un-Islamic, for it is a service to injustice. We must all work to make anti-Zionism as reflexive in the USA tomorrow as Zionism is today.

Zionism and the State of Israel present people of Jewish or Ashkenazi ancestry with a severe ethical problem because Zionists claim to represent all Jewish people and Israel is self-defined as the state of the Jewish people. As long as Jews or Ashkenazim are silent, they give consent. There are four ovious models that they can use in acting against Zionism.

1. Doctore Seuss (Theodore Geisel) albeit an American of German ancestry took an advance garde position to propagandize against everything for which Nazism stood and to advocate early entry of the USA into a war against Nazi Germany. American Jews and Ashkenazim have no excuse not to imitate Geisel with similar opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel.

2. Marlene Dietrich took the position that if Nazis define what it means to be German, then she was not German. She left Germany and never hesitated to condemn Nazism and Nazi Germany. Israeli Jews could take exactly the same position, renounce their Jewishness as defined by the Israeli government, emigrate from Israel and denounce Zionism and the State of Israel at every possible chance.

3. Nataśa Kandić albeit a Serb never missed a chance to condemn Serb racism, to thwart Serb anti-Albanian action and to advise NATO to attack Serbia. Concerned Jews should condemn Zionist racism, work to thwart Zionist anti-Palestinian action and should demand that NATO attack the State of Israel on the same grounds that NATO took action against Serbia.

4. German anti-Nazi resistance groups like the White Rose undertook sabotage against Nazi Germany. Israeli Jewish groups should likewise undertake campaigns of sabotage against the State of Israel. In a sense, when Allegra Pacheco took Israeli citizenship to fight Zionism she was following the example of the White Rose.

As long as the effects of the last 50 years of Zionist indoctrination of the American population can be overcome, combined efforts of Jews and non-Jews of good will should be able swiftly to end the US-Israel alliance, to eliminate Zionism as a living political ideology and to obtain justice and restitution for the Palestinian people.