Family resemblances and blood relations. posted by Richard Seymour

Zionism is not fascism and Ariel Sharon is not Adolf Hitler. That ends my tour of the patently obvious. I would now like to take you through some of the ideological overlaps between Zionism and fascism - simply because it needs bringing attention to. If you don't like it, discount for prejudice, and compare it to something else you find even more offensive:

The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed the 'historical right' ([Anita] Shapira also refers to it as the 'proprietary right') of the Jews to Palestine. It was a "right that required no proof ... a fundamental component of all Zionist programmes". Steeped in German Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only - and only Jews could - establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil there. Noting the 'German source', Shapira points to the 'recurrent motif' in Zionism of the 'mysticism that links blood and soil', the "cult of heroes, death and graves", the belief that "graves are the source of the vital link with the land, and they generate the loyalty of man to that soil", and that "blood fructifies the soil (in an almost literal sense)", and so on. Even so sober a thinker as Ahad Ha'am could aver that Palestine was "a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for far-fetched proofs". The veteran Zionist leader, Mennahem Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that "the Arabs recognise unconditionally the historic title of the Jews to the land".

This sort of 'historic right' was also siezed by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitimate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", "fertilised by the most noble ancient German blood", "germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav set foot there", "teutonic-German Volksbloden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula. ... In the 6th and 7th Century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land... - admittedly only for a few hundred years", etc. The Slavic 'interlopers', by contrast, were seen as 'history's squatters' who merely 'existed' in surroundings that they 'could not master' ... Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe's 'defender' and 'bulwark' against the 'East', and the 'bearers of civilisation' against 'barbarism'. A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia", and an "outpost of civilisation against barbarism".

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[T]he claim of Jewish 'homelessness' is founded in a cluster of assumptions that both negates the idea of liberal citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the state belongs to the majority ethnic nation. In a word, the Zionist case for a Jewish state is as valid or as invalid as he anti-Semitic case for an ethnic state that marginalizes Jews. (Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, 1995, pp 100-1).

Zionism does not merely seek to create a Jewish state on someone else's land - in doing so, it internalises the anti-Semitic view of Jews as being somehow 'foreign' to Europe. Hence, the notoriously shameful behaviour of the Zionist Federation of Germany during the 1930s, and Ben Gurion's interesting thought as Jews were being gassed by the Nazis: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative." Hence, the President of the World Zionist Organisation telling the world as far back as 1912: “each country can only absorb a limited number of Jews … Germany has already too many Jews”. Interestingly, the above argument often yields the old argumentum ad baculum fallacy - you cannot hold this view because it could easily lead to, or could be interpreted as, and may give succour to... Rarely is it argued against on its factual merits.