Anti-Semitism Worldwide 1999/2000

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE: EXTREME RIGHT PERCEPTIONS OF ZIONISM

Roni Stauber*

After the end of World War Two and the foundation of the State of Israel, and especially in the wake of the Six Day War, anti-Zionism became associated mainly with the radical left. It was also used by the Arab world, and to some extent by the Soviet Union and its satellites, as a political weapon against Israel. In that context the term anti-Zionism was intended to de-legitimize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The anti-Zionist campaign culminated in 1975 in the UN Assembly vote equating Zionism with racism.

In the 1960s and 1970s the radical left, in which Jews had always played a major role, made a principled distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Occasionally anti-Semitic nuances and stereotypes, particularly in regard to the notion of a “Zionist conspiracy,” infiltrated leftist propaganda against Zionism and Israel. For some radical leftists the extreme anti-Zionist stance was only a disguise for deep anti-Semitic feelings. Nonetheless, in contrast to the extreme right concept of anti-Zionism, especially of the 1980s and 1990s (discussed below), the anti-Zionist stance of the extreme left was not a substitute for anti-Semitism. In fact, many left radicals considered themselves to be in the forefront of the struggle against anti-Semitism, while seeing Zionism as a reactionary, chauvinist ideology, the tool of imperialism and a racist movement. Zionism was portrayed as the mirror-image of anti-Semitism, and the Zionists as collaborators of the anti-Semites and even of the Nazis, wrote the historian Robert Wistrich. The numerous articles by anti-Zionists on the alleged cooperation between Israel Kastner, the head of the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee, and Adolf Eichmann in Budapest in 1944, well illustrate this theory.¹

In contrast, while the struggle against Zionism figured in extreme right-wing publications, it was not central to the weltanschauung and propaganda of this camp, either in the pre-war period or in the first decades thereafter. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, Israel, and Zionism as an international entity, came to be regarded by white supremacists and extreme nationalist groups in the US and in Europe as their main enemy. Hence, the theory of Zionist world domination became one of their principal (sometimes even the principal) ideological components, and extreme Islamic groups were viewed as the spearhead of the worldwide struggle against Zionism and Israel.

The aim of this study is to analyze this process. It will describe past and current attitudes of the extreme right toward Zionism, focusing especially on continuity and change in extreme right perceptions of Zionism.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the attitude of extreme nationalist anti-Semites toward Zionism was equivocal. On the one hand, they were fascinated by the idea of emptying Europe of the Jews, which seemed to be the fulfillment of their dreams and the implementation of their political program;² on the other, they associated the foundation and activities of a worldwide organization such as the Zionist movement with the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy. This notion was mentioned in several works of fiction and forged documents throughout the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, most notably in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.³ In addition, the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine contradicted a fundamental belief of ardent anti-Semites that the Jews were not a genuine nation because their racial qualities did not accord with those needed to establish a national entity.⁴ Thus, their attitude toward Zionism was a complex of differing and even contradictory conceptions and beliefs -- supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine, yet harboring skepticism, and even fear, when this was related to a Jewish state.

In 1878 Viktor Istoczy, a member of the Hungarian parliament and the initiator of Hungarian political anti-Semitism, proposed re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as a partial solution to “the Eastern Question.”⁵ Shortly afterwards, his proposal was adopted by Wilhelm Marr, considered the forefather of the racist anti-Semitic movement in Germany. A massive evacuation to Palestine, wrote the historian Moshe Zimmerman, could have provided a solution to his apocalyptic fear of the triumph of the Jews in Germany.⁶ Fourteen years later, when Herzl’s book The Jewish State was published, it was welcomed by the leading French anti-Semite Edouard Drumont. Like Marr and Istoczy, Drumont was attracted by the Zionist concept of a Jewish exodus to Palestine.⁷

The Zionist idea of solving the Jewish question by massive emigration to Palestine also motivated Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve to meet Herzl in Petersburg. Pleve who was suspected of being a principal instigator of the pogrom against the Jews in Kishinev in 1903, expressed interest in Herzl’s idea of acquiring Palestine from the Ottoman Empire as a national home for Jewish immigrants.⁸ In Germany as well during the Weimar years some of the most prominent anti-Semites looked to Zionism as the only realistic solution to the “Jewish problem.”⁹

In the wake of the Holocaust, it has been rightly claimed by various scholars, that the Zionists failed to understand the irrational nature of anti-Semitism and its genocidal potential. It seems that the image of the Jew as an international foe, and not only as a hateful, local element, was not really internalized by Zionists thinkers. Although it was perfectly understood that the interest of anti-Semites in Zionism was motivated only by hatred of Jews, the Zionists believed that it could be channeled into what they considered the ultimate solution to anti-Semitism -- a Jewish homeland in Palestine.¹⁰

By the end of the nineteenth century the myth of world Jewish domination had become part of the anti-Semitic repertoire. The alleged international Jewish conspiracy against Germany was, for example, a main theme in Wilhelm Marr’s Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, as well as in some of his other publications.¹¹

In that period the philanthropic activities of several Jewish societies, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, were described in several anti-Semitic publications as a front for an international Jewish conspiracy. Die Eroberung der Welt durch die Juden by Osman-Bey, which was widely disseminated in Germany at the end of the 1870s, portrayed Alliance Israélite Universelle as the main tool of world Jewish subversion.¹² The image of the Jew as an international foe became fundamental to modern anti-Semitism. Racists and followers of the Völkisch weltanschauung defined the Jewish people as a universally pernicious entity and the Jewish character as the epitome of evil.¹³

Still, it should be emphasized that political and social anti-Semitism before the Nazi period operated mainly on the local level -- against Jews in particular countries. The fantasy of a universal struggle against the Jewish people, which has become inseparable from modern anti-Semitism, was not the main component of political anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites fought mainly against what they perceived as the main threat to their nation -- the achievements of Jewish emancipation in their countries¹⁴ -- which maybe led the Zionists’ to an erroneous evaluation regarding the irrational aspects of modern anti-Semitism. The American Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg wrote that Zionist thinkers assumed that anti-Semitism could remain “hot enough to push the Jews out… the engine driving the train towards Zion… [but that it would never] break the ultimate bonds of decency.”¹⁵

In Germany, as well as in Austria and Hungary, the extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic campaign was directed principally against the concept that the Jews were not a nation but a religion. Hence, even extreme anti-Semitic publications such as Dresden Deutsche Wacht could express indirect support for the Zionist cause while severely attacking anti-Zionist attitudes:. “... to dwell on the soil and on its own pof land as an independent nation under sovereign rule is what the Jewish people fear...The question is whether this will be done by the Jews of their own free will or whether they will be forced to do so.”¹⁶

The alleged Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world gained momentum In the aftermath of World War I. For anti-Semites, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was the main reference point, the ultimate proof that an evil power was plotting against the entire world. They were distributed during that period in Europe first by ultra-nationalist Russian émigrés and later by leading anti-Semites and racists such as Theodor Fritsch and the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.¹⁷

The claim that The Protocols actually originated in the Zionist movement was made by some of its first editors. In Germany it was spread mainly by Rosenberg, who had considerable influence on the Nazi weltanschauung.¹⁸ Nevertheless, although mentioned by various anti-Semitic writers as the source of The Protocols, the Zionist movement did not become a central target for anti-Semitic propaganda either in Germany or in Central and Eastern Europe. Even Rosenberg expressed his support for the Zionist cause, which would evacuate the Jews from Europe. In 1919 he wrote: “Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.”¹⁹ Thus, anti-Semitic propaganda was directed mainly against the emancipated Jew, the Bolshevik Jew, and especially, the assimilated Jew, the “foreign” element, who had acquired equal civil rights and even economic and political influence. In this respect the assassination of the German Jewish minister for foreign affairs Walter Rathenau, who was described by his killers as one of the Elders of Zion, symbolized the link between the seizure of power within Germany by those who “pretended” to be Germans and the alleged worldwide conspiracy.²⁰ In France, Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum, was labeled by French anti-Semites the “leader of the Hebrews living in our land,” and a foreign agent either of the Anglo-Saxon countries or of the Soviet Union.²¹

The ambivalent attitude toward the Zionist movement continued in the first years of the Nazi regime. On the one hand, the Nazis supported the idea of Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine, giving clear preference to the Zionist movement over other Jewish organizations in Germany. On the other hand, they suspected that Palestine would become a base for a Jewish conspiracy against Germany.²² The consequent Transfer Agreement between the Nazi government and the Zionist movement created preferential conditions for emigrants to Palestine compared to other destinations. This became part of the Nazi propaganda campaign against the Jewish commercial boycott of Germany.²³

The aggressive Nazi response to the Peel partition plan of 1937 demonstrates the distinction made between their practical support of Jewish emigration to Palestine and their objection to the creation of a Jewish state. German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath warned that Palestine could become a base for an international conspiracy against Germany much as the Vatican was for political Catholicism and Moscow for the Comintern.²⁴ Already Hitler had written in Mein Kampf:

In the first three decades after World War II, anti-Zionism was principally found in communist countries, in the Arab world and in the radical left camp. The anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli campaign intensified after 1967. Although anti-Semitic attacks were perpetrated by extreme right activists, in the 1960s and 1970s Jewish scholars and the Jewish public were mainly concerned with the anti-Zionist stance of the Soviet Union and its satellites and of the extreme left, which was frequently described as a mask for deep-seated anti-Semitism.²⁶ In both Europe and the US Jewish organizations such as the ADL warned of the danger to the Jewish people of the radical left, which they called the totalitarian left. ²⁷

However, in the 1980s and especially during the 1990s, simultaneously with the decline of the extreme left as an ideological camp and the collapse of the Soviet Union, anti-Zionism became a major component in the ideology of the extreme right, and Zionism became the main symbol of evil Jewish world domination.

The centrality of anti-Zionism in extreme right ideology, both in the United States and in Europe in the 1990s, was undoubtedly influenced by the prolonged anti-Zionist campaign of the Soviet Union, the Arab countries and the extreme left. Two decades previously, by the end of the 1960s, left radicals in Europe, especially in France and including many Jews, attempted to explain the fundamental differences between the concepts of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They even claimed that one could be a fascist and even a Nazi anti-Semite and at the same time admire Israel. Indeed during the Six Day War, while part of the extreme right expressed antipathy toward Israel as a Jewish state, some of the most ardent French fascists and anti-Semites, including former high-ranking officials of the Vichy administration such as Xavier Vallat and Jean Louis Tixier Vignancour, expressed their support for Israel.²⁸ Nevertheless, French anti-Semites and fascist veterans did not become philo-Semites. Their support for Israel stemmed from their hatred of Arabs, hundreds of thousands of whom had immigrated to France from North Africa. “It was outrageous that Vallat supported Israel and that in our school the extreme right called for demonstrations to support Israel, which were organized together with the Zionists. This connection between the anti-Arab and the anti-Semitic French extreme right with Zionism and the State of Israel turned me extremely anti-Israel,” said one Jewish radical referring to his activities in France at the end of the 1960s.²⁹ Although the sincerity of these words should not be doubted, in some cases extreme anti-Zionist statements made by left radicals at the end of 1960s were actually a cover for deep anti-Semitism. With the prolonged decline of the radical left, the anti-Semitic tone of its more extreme remnants became more pronounced. Some ultra-left terrorist groups directed their activities not only against Israeli targets but against Jewish ones as well. A striking example in this respect was the plan to assassinate Jewish leaders in Germany in 1977.³⁰

The anti-Zionist influence of the radical left and the Soviet Union and its satellites on the extreme right was evident both in Russia and Eastern Europe as well as in Western Europe. In Russia, on the eve of the collapse of the communist regime, the ultra-chauvinist movement Pamyat made Zionism its principal target. The identification of Zionism as a worldwide enemy, plotting against Russia and East European countries such as Romania, was strengthened in the post-communist era by the new “red-brown” groups established by communists and fascist elements. By the late 1990s anti-Zionism, as a guise for anti-Semitism, became a major theme in the propaganda of the new Russian nationalist communist party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).³¹ In various parts of Europe the so called Holocaust myth was portrayed as a Zionist forgery by self-styled leftists, Arab chauvinists and extreme right activists. A foremost example of this shared conception was the joint initiative to organize a world anti-Zionist conference in Scandinavia in the early 1990s.³² Another example was Roger Garaudy’s’ anti-Zionist and Holocaust-distorting book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, published in France by theradical left, and later translated, re-published and used for propaganda purposes by the extreme right.³³

The conversion of radicals and revolutionariesinto anti-Semites is not new. Indeed, ever since Wilhelm Marr and Richard Wagner participated in the 1848 revolution and then went on to become anti-Semites, radical ideas or revolutionary concepts have been transformed into anti-Semitism. A more recent example of this transformation from left to right extremism is the case of Horst Mahler, one of the founders of the extreme left terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), who crossed the lines to the German extreme right party, the DVU. In November 1999, at a meeting of Austrian extreme rightists he spoke of the necessity of freeing Germany from “Judischen Prinzipien,” and from “Jewish money worship.” When asked in an interview about his transition from the extreme left to the extreme right, he said that his beliefs had not basically changed, since the enemy remained the same: “Der Feind ist der Gleich.”³⁴

The intensification of this process, in which Zionism became identified with world Jewish domination and anti-Zionism became a substitute for anti-Semitism in the extreme right weltanschauung, was influenced considerably by conspiracy theories expounded in the early 1980s among American white supremacists and gradually adopted by European rightists, especially in Scandinavia.

The conspiracy myth had played an important role in American anti-Semitism from the 1920s, especially in the wake of the anti-Jewish onslaught in Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent and his publication of the International Jew.³⁵ The Jewish conspiracy, both within the US and internationally, was a principal theme in anti-Semitic propaganda distributed in the US in the 1930s and even in the early 1940s by the US German Nazi movement -- the German American Bund, as well as by other American extreme right and pro-Nazi movements, such as the Silver Shirts. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewish conspiracy theory was associated mainly with an alleged Bolshevik plan to conquer the US and the entire world -- the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Zionism as an expression of the Jewish conspiracy appeared only marginally in anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi publications, since Zionism, in contrast to Bolshevism, was not regarded as a powerful Jewish tool for gaining control.³⁶

There was basically no change in the perceived role of Zionism in the alleged Jewish conspiracy in the first decades after World War II, despite the fact that in 1948 Jews had succeeded in achieving real political status. Anti-Semitism decreased somewhat after the war but intensified in the early 1960s, which were characterized by an upsurge of the extreme right in the US, probably in reaction to Kennedy’s electoral success and the new Democratic administration. Differing little from their predecessors in the 1930s, a main concern of these groups, and the raison d’être of organizations such the John Birch Society, was combating the alleged conspiracy of secret communist agents who had supposedly infiltrated every facet of American life in their effort to dominate the country. According to these groups, US foreign and domestic policies since the 1930s were elements of Bolshevik strategy, stemming from a communist Jewish conspiracy. In the 1950s and early 1960s Zionism, or Israel as a tool of a world Jewish conspiracy, was seldom mentioned.³⁷ It was only at the end of the 1960s that it became a chief component of, and then synonymous with, the Jewish conspiracy. As ADL researchers Forster and Epstein wrote in 1974: “Rightists have virtually carbon-copied the communists and other revolutionary leftists… in denouncing Israel… and in blaming ‘Zionists’ for the world’s troubles.”³⁸ This process was probably influenced by the fact that Israel had gradually become a central, and at times, the main factor in Jewish political activities, and was a close, and later a strategic, ally of the US.

One of the main contributors to the image of Zionism as frightening and all-powerful was Willis A. Carto, the head of Liberty Lobby, the main anti-Semitic organization in the US. In 1972 the organization published an anti-Israel booklet entitled America First, which called for American “neutrality” in the Middle East. In addition to allegations against Israel, it was asserted that thousands of undercover “Zionist fixers,” controlled the US Congress, as well as the nation’s radio and television broadcasting networks. By the end of the 1970s Holocaust denial became one of the main themes of Spotlight, Liberty Lobby’s main organ. The alleged Holocaust hoax was presented as a Zionist invention in order to extort money and gain political power.³⁹

Ten years later, in the early 1980s, the leaders of the most extreme white supremacist groups, such as Aryan Nation, made a complete identification between Zionism and the American administration. Inspired by the ideas of the Christian “Identity” Church and motivated by deep hatred for the establishment, these groups adopted the acronym ZOG, Zionist Occupation Government, as their battle cry. Their declaration of war on the administration, which they viewed as the domain of the international Zionist conspiracy, was inspired by William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. Between 1985 and 1988 The Order, an extreme right terrorist group headed by Robert Jay Mathews, committed a series of crimes, including bank robbery and the murder of the Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, as part of their struggle against ZOG and its agents.⁴⁰

Influenced by the American extreme right, their counterparts in Europe embraced the ZOG concept. By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy had been replaced by the Zionist conspiracy. In Scandinavia, especially Sweden, ZOG became the motto of the terrorist White Aryan Resistance, the VAM network, which had adopted both the ideology and the modus operandi of US white supremacists in their struggle against an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race.⁴¹

The development of the anti-Zionist concept into a central theme in the ideology of the extreme right created a mood of sympathy among its adherents toward the Arab cause. In the 1970s and 1980s pro-Arab slogans against Zionism and Israel, which once typified the extreme left, were taken up by the extreme right. The perception of a mutual “world enemy” spawned cooperation with Arab activists, a course which contradicted the white supremacist world view . In 1973 Liberty Lobby led the way when it sponsored a special “fact-finding” tour to Arab countries and attacked the American government for its pro-Israel policy.⁴²

This cooperation culminated in the 1990s in the definitive pro-Saddam Husayn stand of the extreme right during the Gulf War. Another significant expression was their identification with Islamist terrorist groups. Like the admiration of the extreme left for the PLO and leftist Palestinian terrorist groups in 1970s, the extreme right viewed Islamist groups as the spearhead of the worldwide struggle against Zionism and Israel. The Stockholm-based Radio Islam, headed by Ahmed Rami, was a major focus of cooperation in the 1990s between far rightists, Holocaust deniers and extremist elements within the Arab World.⁴³

In his article “European History – Seedbed of the Holocaust,” the late historian of modern Europe Yaakov Talmon wrote: “Even if we agree that antagonism to the Jews is an unchanging element, a primary factor, continuous and identical… Even then we shall be obliged to recognize a multiplicity of formulations, expressions, methods of implementation… all dependent on place, time, political and socio-economic conditions, moral and spiritual values and psychological factors. In short, anti-Semitism may be an autonomous, or, more exactly, a primary phenomenon, but in one way or another it is a function of external factors.”⁴⁴

Since the Middle Ages the stereotype of the Jew has been composed of several negative images, the product of Jewish-Gentile relations as well as ofhistorical circumstances. Originally, the Jew in Europe was viewed first and foremost as a foreign element. In modern times, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, the civic status of the Jew has changed considerably and his image as a mighty worldwide conspirator has gradually become a central element in the negative Jewish stereotype. Nevertheless, before the Holocaust anti-Semitism was conducted mainly on the local level, against the “foreign element” which had succeeded in dominating the country. Thus, anti-Semitic onslaughts were directed mainly against the liberal emancipated Jew or against the socialist and the communist Jew. The image of the Jew as part, or even as initiator, of an international communist conspiracy was strengthened in the 1920s and 1930s after the Bolshevik Revolution, with the increasing power of the communist parties as well as communist attempts to launch revolutions, and it came to a head in the Nazi era. Zionism, however, was not perceived as a real power and anti-Semites were ambivalent toward it.

In the first decades after World War II, the Jewish conspiracy in the eyes of the extreme right was almost completely associated with communism. With the decline of communism, on the one hand, and the strengthening of Israel on the other, and in the wake of the prolonged anti-Zionist campaign of the extreme left and the USSR and its satellites, the world Jewish conspiracy became completely identified by the extreme right with Zionism. ZOG became synonymous with the new tendencies toward globalization which threatened to destroy national integrity, and with an international power which was plotting constantly to acquire new territories.

“Within the framework of ZOG ideology, immigration [of foreign workers] is presented as a strategic weapon in the hands of the Jews in their ongoing war against the Aryans,”⁴⁵ wrote Tore Bjorgo, a leading expert on terrorist groups in Scandinavia, on the fundamental difference between hatred for immigrants and anti-Semitism. The anti-Zionist concept makes a clear distinction between xenophobia, and even racism and anti-Semitism, which is not always understood. Today, in contrast to the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, hate propaganda against foreign immigrants who have swamped the countries of Europe is rarely directed against local Jews. The struggle is against supposed Jewish political control, an alleged Zionist conspiracy to subject the world to Jewish domination.

*Dr. Roni Stauber is a researcher at the Stephen Roth Institute and teaches in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.

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