Zionists treat Jewish people as mere "human material"
Part 6 of a series on Zionism as an anti-Jewish, racist ideology
[A note before we begin here: since the last entry in this series a reader made me aware of a pamphlet by the UK Communist Party’s Harpal Brar, on the same subject matter as Part 5 of this series. People are apparently being arrested for distributing it, but it’s in the UK so no surprise there. Reading the pamphlet made me aware of Lenni Brenner’s work on the topic, the 1983 book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, and the follow up 51 Documents. Both works are well documented and cover similar ground in case you want to continue studying this topic. OK, on we go.]
In Part 5 of this series I mentioned that the goal of the WW2-era Zionists was to get “human material” for their colony - the material being Jewish people. The acquisition of this “good human material” involved cruel measures by the early Zionists at several key moments in Jewish history, as the book by Yosef Grodzinsky of that title (renamed in the English version to In the Shadow of the Holocaust). One review of Grodzinsky’s work can be found here.
Grodzinsky describes a moment when Zionists resorted to cruel measures against Jews in order to acquire this “human material”.
It was the immediate aftermath of WW2, when the Nazi displaced persons (DP) camps were taken over by the Allies. Grodzinsky writes: “thousands of children were lingering in the DP camps, their suffering generating empathy and a desire to help. Perched on bunks amidst the filth like all survivors, their weak bodies were, more than the rest, suffering from malnutrition and disease.”
Organizations from the Allied countries made plans for the expedited rescue of orphans to France, England, and elsewhere. But Zionist leaders objected:
‘“The specter of Jewish children going to European countries seemed threatening to them, as it ran counter to their project—to bring all surviving children to Palestine, as part of Ben-Gurion’s vision “to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews.”’
The British Jewish envoy, Shalom Adler-Rudel was sent to negotiate with the Zionist leadership - to try to get them to agree to let the children leave to Europe. The Zionists refused to let the children leave the camps until their transfer to Palestine was arranged: “I am a good Zionist,” he told them. But “your decision is not right.”
Another postwar moment Grodzinsky describes is when Zionists attempted to recruit Jewish survivors from the camps into the military to fight the Palestinians. One reporter from the camps, Moshe Ajzenbud, described the mood in a New York socialist magazine:
“Most Jewish refugees who had been through the hell of the ghetto, slavery and death camps under the Nazis, Soviet forced-labor camps, and other disasters, yearn for some quiet place. Regardless of their views on current events in Palestine, they feel physically drained, and have no desire to go into the fire again. They rightfully ask—even the Zionists among them—why do we, having been so pained and tortured, need to go back into the fire?”
When only 700 signed up, the Zionists imposed conscription. “Employees were fired, residents were evicted from their apartments, others were fined, or denied the supplementary food rations that the JDC was distributing to all camp Jews; others were simply beaten up.” Grodzinsky adds these recruitment methods were not anomalous, but systemic:
“Violent incidents were numerous: The archives are replete with hundreds of official documents describing brutal methods and actions carried out in an identical manner in a large number of camps in Germany and Austria, taking place mostly between March and August 1948. The archives also contain testimony and affidavits about “waves of Zionist harassment” in the camps,as well as vile descriptions, coming from various camps, of forced removal of Jews objecting to the draft from Camp Committees, arrests, and beatings. In a camp near Ulm, for example, “a father of Giyus evader Wecker was beaten up, as was the father of one who did not register; in another case an old father—Richter Aizik, was beaten because his son Moshe Richter did not register…”
The Zionists were more than willing to resort to violence against Jews to make sure the latter were available as “human material” for their colony.
Zionists suppressed diverse Jewish cultures inside Israel
Once they ended up in Israel, the culture Jews brought with them was negated and erased by the Zionists who had already settled there (referred to as Sabras in the quote that follows). American-Israeli blogger Matt Adler wrote in 2018 that “many Jews arrived (and indeed, arrive) to Israel, Sabras greeted them with hatred. Iraqi Jews were shamed for speaking Judeo-Arabic. Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors were not only attacked for speaking Yiddish, they were also called “sabonim” or “soap”…because of the rumor that Hitler made soap out of their families’ bodies.”
In The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Israeli historian Tom Segev described the Zionist campaign of assimilation of the German Jews who went to Israel as refugees from Hitler (called yekkes). When German newspapers sprang up, Zionist activists suppressed them.
“The aim was "to get the German newspapers out of our lives.” Some of the participants said it meant war. One of them proposed demanding of advertisers that they refrain from buying space in the foreign-language press—and demanding of Hebrew newspapers that they not accept ads from those who advertised there. Coffeehouses, barbershops, and hotels should also be told not to offer foreign-language newspapers to their customers.'”
The campaign was ultimately successful, but not before some dramatic moments:
“The intolerance and fanaticism that characterized the campaign to promote Hebrew offended many, the German Immigrants’ Association warned in its newsletter, adopting a heroine for itself: a fourteen-year-old girl, a pupil at a Jerusalem school, to whom a classmate had said, “Go back to Hitler.” The brave and proud girl slapped her classmate on the cheek.”
Yemeni Jews got it even worse. Yakov Rabkin (A Threat From Within, pg. 43) describes their situation:
“The Yemeni Jews, well known for their devotion to the Torah and for their Judaic erudition, were subjected upon their arrival in Israel in the late 1940s to secular re-education campaigns, often in isolated camps. This measure was aimed primarily at the young, who, while not actually kidnapped, were nonetheless forced to endure ideological pressures designed to estrange them from tradition. Many sources concur: physical violence was employed, particularly when the young secular camp commanders forbade access to young religious Jews who wished to assist the internees… Their Zionist educators apparently forced the young Yemeni Jews to harvest oranges on the Sabbath, to walk about bareheaded and to cut off the side-curls the Yemeni Jews had worn for centuries.”
Zionists wanted to craft the “human material” of Jews into a specific type of colonist. The cultural diversity of Jewish life in the diaspora was disdained.
Zionists set out to destroy Jewish diaspora life in Iraq and Egypt
Zeev Sternhell in the 1998 book, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, discusses Zionism’s negation of the diaspora:
“a hatred of the diaspora and a rejection of Jewish life were a kind of methodological necessity for Zionism… not only was Jewish history in exile deemed to be unimportant, but the value of living Jews, Jews of flesh and blood, depended entirely on their use as raw material for natural revival.”
The project of colonizing Palestine has required Zionists to destroy diasporic Jewish life. Zionists used terrorism to destroy the relationships between Jewish communities and the countries in which they lived.
Iraq terrorist bombings 1949-1952: John Cooley, in the 2005 book Alliance Against Babylon: the US, Israel, and Iraq, cited Naim Giladi, Rabbi Elmer Berger, and Mordecai Ben-Porat about a series of five terrorist bombings against the Jewish community in Baghdad between 1949-52 that helped spark the exodus of Iraq’s Jewish community to Israel.
One bomb on March 19, 1950, at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad;
The next April 8, 1950, a grenade attack at the Dar-el-Beida cafe. “That night and the next day, leaflets scattered in Jewish neighbourhoods called on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.”
Another grenade attack followed on May 10, this time against a Jewish owned car dealership; another on June 3, 1950 in the wealthy Jewish neighbourhood of El-Batawin. “The Zionist emigration activists asked Tel Aviv to raise the quota for immigration from Iraq.”
Another bomb next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shasghura building on June 5. “Most members of the Baghdad Jewish community believed that extremist Iraqis, probably all Muslims, wanted to kill them or drive them out, so as to seize their property and money.”
On January 14, 1951, a major grenade attack hit a synagogue full of Kurdish Jews, killing two children and one adult and injuring dozens. By March, “the tempo of flights increased to three or four a day.”
By the end of the exodus, just 5,000 Iraqi Jews remained of a community that had numbered 130,000. Once the damage was done, the Iraqi authorities caught a man named Yehudah Tajjar, who gave them the names of 15 conspirators. Israel’s emissary, Mordecai Ben-Porat, wrote a book, To Baghdad and Back, (cited by Cooley) that argued that Israel was innocent of wrongdoing. “A series of letters and affidavits, attached to the official Israeli findings, seem to show that the three Jews executed were innocent and framed, and that the attacks were the work of Iraqi officialdom.”
One of the Iraqi Jews who was part of the exodus to Israel after these bombings was Avi Shlaim, who would become one of the so-called Israeli ‘New Historians’. In his book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew, he concludes that the Zionist underground was responsible for three of these bombings, but that two others were the work of other Iraqi factions. His evidence includes the initial Baghdad police report, which Shlaim believes “constitutes undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that helped to terminate two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.”
The Lavone Affair / Operation Susannah, Egypt 1954: The Iraq bombings were repeated in Egypt with a series of bombs in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954. In Shlaim’s description:
“A number of Egyptian Jews were arrested for planting bombs in public places and in the US Information Service offices in Cairo and Alexandria. This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition.”
See also Shlaim’s fellow “New Historian” Joel Beinin’s 1998 book, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of Modern Diaspora, Chapter 4.
Shlaim calls these operations “Cruel Zionism” and argues in his book that while the Palestinians were the “main victims of the Zionist project”, the “Jews of the Arab lands” were a “second category of the victims of the Zionist movement”. The conspiracy and terrorism against Jewish people in Iraq and Egypt is another example of the anti-Jewish nature of Zionism.
In their acquisition and shaping of “human material” for their colony, Zionists have shown no compunction about the ruthless destruction of Jewish lives, cultures, and traditions.