BBC: ’skinhead racists not a problem’
BBC World Service recently ran a major feature on the rise of anti-semitism, but somehow it all seemed to be about Israel.
Writer Howard Jacobson complained that the word “massacre” had been misused against Israel over Operation Cast Lead, rather than “fight”: one might query this as a misuse, considering that Israel lost seven dead while Gazans lost 1400, nearly 350 of them children. But the BBC let that pass: after all, he’s just won the Booker Prize so he must know how to use words.
The main drift was that the old skinhead/neo-fascists were no longer a problem for Jews. The new anti-semitism was coming from anti-Zionists in general and in particular Muslim anti-Zionists. As they were against Israel, they were anti-semites.
The skinhead fascists are no longer a problem because they are far too busy rampaging through Muslim areas. And they fly Israel’s flag, so they can’t be anti-semites, can they?
Anti-semitism is indeed very important to Israel. It is its raison d’etre. But from its very inception, Zionism shunned any European or worldwide fight against anti-semitic racism. It preferred to remove Jews to Palestine. Israel’s founding father Herzl wrote of Jews bringing anti-semitism with them wherever they went, as if they were responsible for their own oppression.
Zionists were willing to pay any price to win a Jewish state and get Jews to come there. Knowing that anti-semitic attacks were a powerful driver of such immigration, they were actively concerned to stop refuge being offered for Jewish victims anywhere else but in the Jewish state. It is also believed they manipulated Jewish communities into a panic exodus from North African and Middle Eastern countries in the early 1950s.
Israel now barely pays lip-service to its supposed role as a haven and agent for persecuted Jewry. What is the state of Israel doing about this rise in anti-semitism that the BBC reports? Has it backed anti-racist struggles? No. It has doubled its embassies’ propaganda budget and instructed each to recruit 1000 people loyal to Israel, and to deploy them in its battle against human rights critics.
A haven for Jews? At no point was the Jewish state there for the Jews; always, the diaspora Jews were expected to act as agents and supporters for Israel, which despised them as shameful products of oppression while constantly capitalising on that oppression. Far from rescuing and rebuilding the wonderful language and culture of Europe’s Jews after its eradication by Nazism, Yiddish culture found no place in the newly established Israel. Neither did Jewish-Arabic culture survive the transition. Only now is a younger generation trying to revive these lost cultures.
As for being a haven for anyone else, in its entire existence Israel has awarded refugee status to just 190 people: roughly 3 per year.
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