Ramazan Yıldırım
Attempting to reconstruct the basic religious discourses of Judaism with a racist perspective, Zionism had become powerful at the level of discourse by taking advantage of the shockingglobal change and new political design environment of the First World War. Jewish elites, oneof the victims of the civil wars in Europe and the fascist policies implemented by Nazi Germany, adopted the Zionist discourse and accelerated the process of building theirhomeland in the systematically occupied Palestinian territories. One of the importantoutcomes of the Second World War was the declaration of the establishment of a Jewish state, Israel, in the usurped territory of Palestine and its acceptance by Western states in a shortperiod of time.
While Zionism planned to build a Jewish state, it also had to rebuild or invent the nation of this state. Because the conditions for the creation of a state were not only a common religiousaffiliation, but also the need to bring together the Jews scattered in different continents, especially in Europe, and then to keep them together in harmony with each other. Jews fromGermany, France, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq and Yemen were to eachother what Germany, France, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq and Yemen were to each other. Therefore, the primary goal was to reconstruct a memory around thecommon denominator of Hebrew, the language of the Bible, and “Eretz Israel”, the promisedland. “In Israel, these piles of memories did not form spontaneously. They were accumulatedlayer by layer since the second half of the nineteenth century by skillful hands reconstructingthe past: They brought together the fragments of the memory of the Jewish and Christianreligions, and on this foundation, thanks to their fertile imagination, they invented an enduring genealogical chain for the Jewish people.”[1] In fact, this new Jewish memory, unlike other religions, reduced Judaism to the denominator of ‘blood ties’ and centered on theidentity of religion and race. From the 19th century onwards, the construction of a discourseconsisting of the confirmation of the arguments used by antisemites in Europe when they triedto exclude Jews as a separate, alien and different race also contains a strange contradiction. Itseems that the newly invented Jewish memory that harbors this strange contradiction has become Israel’s official historical thesis: “There is no irony in history that comes close to this: There was a time in Europe when anyone who asserted that Jews constituted a foreign peopleby origin was considered anti-Semitic. Today, on the contrary, anyone who dares to declarethat those who are recognized as Jews in the world do not constitute a separate people ornation in their own right is immediately labeled an “enemy of Israel.”[2]
Zionism, which tries to construct a mentality based on suffering and chosenness based on theHolocaust in Nazi Germany, tries to see Jews as being in debt to all non-Jewish people. Itmakes an amoral distinction between its own suffering and the suffering of others, and keepsalive its sense of chosenness – of superiority – by asserting that its suffering is unique andunparalleled, passing it down from generation to generation. Therefore, “Jewish elitesbranded anyone who opposed their neo-conservative policies as anti-Semitic in order toaggressively protect their institutional and class interests.”[3] The exploitation of theHolocaust in this context to protect the interests of Jews living outside Israel has led to theconclusion that the attempt to reinforce the uniqueness of Jews with the uniqueness of theirsuffering is actually a move to protect their position in the Western world, especially in theUnited States. “Jewish elites living in the US were skeptical of the establishment of a Jewishstate for fear of being accused of “dual loyalty”. In order to differentiate themselves from theleft in the US-USSR rivalry of the Cold War period and to gain prestige in the eyes of theAmerican state, they started to talk about the Nazi Holocaust in order to blame the Soviets.”[4] Merchant Jews, who made the Holocaust a protective armor for their own interests, alsoengaged in pain exploitation and monopolization by saying that the Holocaust was a uniqueevent that had never happened in history and that it represented the hatred of non-Jews againstJews.
Since the mid-19th century, the ideology of Zionism has been influenced by the nationmovements and nationalist movements of the period, while acting with the ideal of bringingall Jews together under one roof on the same piece of land. Especially considering theinfluence of German nationalist thought on Zionism, the Nazism-Zionism similarity has gained a dimension that goes beyond emulation to sameness. Shlomo Sand, a contemporaryJewish historian, states that Zionism developed in the shadow of German racism, and that it was the Jews living in the urban-settlement areas of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania andRussia who formed, spread and put into practice the theories of Zionism. [5] For centuries, the ideology of Zionism has portrayed communities living in different geographies and havingno common characteristics beyond their membership in Judaism as a homogeneouscommunity with concepts such as “Jewish history”, “Jewish culture”, “Jewish race”, “Jewishgenius”, “Jewish literature” and “Jewish art”. By filling the content of these concepts withcertain template expressions, the richness of Jewish communities arising from their culturaland social diversity is denied.[6]
In 1948, Israel unilaterally declared its independence and was recognized by the major statesof the period after the UN General Assembly in 1947 unanimously approved theestablishment of two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, in the Palestinian territories. Withthe declaration of the State of Israel, Jews living in different parts of the world moved towardsthe occupied Palestinian territories with great encouragement and guidance, whilePalestinians, who could not resist the terror and deportation policies they were exposed to, were left homeless. Thus, a solution was found to the Jewish problem, which had reached itspeak with the Nazi atrocities, and the US and other European states, which wanted to get ridof the Jews in their own lands, supported this Zionist project. Pro-Zionists living outsideIsrael stayed in their regions and stayed close to the centers of power, capital and media, influencing decision-making mechanisms in favor of Israel, and today the state of Israelderives its greatest strength from them. Although Jewish institutions in the Western worldpropagandize that they are in “exile” outside the “holy land”, in fact they constitute Israel’sgreatest power. They show their loyalty by providing the greatest global support to the stateof Israel, which they see as the guardian of the “holy land”.
While the state of Israel rises on the basis of someone else’s pain, it has acted like a racistorganization with its policies towards non-Jews living in the lands it usurped and declared itssovereignty, and has shown that it has no sacred or humanitarian values. Their actions to date, under the guise of a state, show that they are not God’s chosen people, but rather seek tooppress and exterminate the Palestinians. Ben Gurion, who did not hide his ambitions on thePalestinian territories, showed the true face of the Zionists when he said that “the world todayrespects nothing but power, and half a century from now, the Palestinian question will be resolved by arms, not by official decisions.”[7] The fact that they see themselves as havingthe right to determine their own destiny in the Palestinian territories and to dispossess the realowners of those territories in order to achieve this goal is a contradictory manifestation of thesense of chosenness that the Zionists use out of context.
Jews living outside Israel have begun to question Zionism, especially in the face of thepainful picture reflected to the world from Gaza, which has been blockaded and bombed forthe last two decades. Although this questioning and criticism cannot stop Israel’s massacres, it shows that Israel’s credit for the last half-century is running out. “After its brilliant victory in June 1967, Israel gained many supporters in the West, but in recent years it has fallen to thelevel of an almost discredited state, especially in Europe. A European Union poll in 2003 ranked Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. A global opinion survey conducted in 2008 described Israel as the biggest obstacle to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian issue.“[8 ] Israel, which cannot get rid of the reflexes of a Zionist organization and cannot act with theresponsibility of being a state, has revealed to the whole world that it is the problem with thegenocide it inflicted on Gaza in the 75th anniversary of its establishment. The circles thatdefine themselves as diaspora Jews are now aware that this unconditional loyalty comes at a great cost for them, because the demographic power of these Jewish institutions is weakeningand the motivations of the younger generations are different. “The comfortable residence of Jews in the countries of “Exile”, the irrepressible love between young people and thegratifying decline of anti-Semitism have come at a high price. Opinion polls show not only an increase in mixed marriages, but also a decline in support and interest in Israel among Jewsunder the age of thirty-five. Solidarity with the Jewish state is a stable and widespreadelement among people over the age of sixty. According to this data, Israel cannot continue todraw its strength from the transnational diaspora in perpetuity.“[9]
[1] Shlomo Sand, How the Jewish People was Invented (From the Bible to Zionism), trans: Işık Ergüden, Doğan Kitap, 2011, p. 36.
[2] Sand, op. cit., p. 41.
[3] Norman G. Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry (The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering), Trans: Utku Umut Bulsun, Kutadgu Publications, 2023-Istanbul, p. 56.
[4] Finkelstein, age, p. 36.
[5] Shlomo Sand, How the Jewish People was Invented (From the Bible to Zionism), Trans: Işık Ergüden, Doğan Kitap, 2011-Istanbul, p. 310.
[6] Abdul Wahhab al-Masîrî, Men humu’l-Yehud wa ma hiye’l-Yahudiyya Darush-Shurûk, Cairo-2009, p. 279.
[7] Stefan Goranov “Racism: A Basic Principle of Zionism”, Zionism and Racism, Ankara University Faculty of Political Sciences Publications, Ankara-1982, p. 33.
[8] Norman G. Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far, Trans: Deniz Özlem Çevik, Nefes Yay. Istanbul-2014, p. 101.
[9] Shlomo Sand, How the Jewish People was Invented, p. 378.