“If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” – Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah commander
“I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity, we are all Hizbullah now.” – Norman Finkelstein, Jewish anti-Zionist
That any human being could proclaim his support for a movement whose goal is to annihilate all the world’s Jews must be shocking to the normal observer. That a Jew could take this position seems all the more astounding.
Yet Norman Finkelstein, university professor and best-selling author, is by no means unique among Jews in his allegiances. His mentor, Noam Chomsky, has publicly embraced the murderous Sheikh Nasrallah. In fact, during the recent war, Chomsky was among several Jewish signatories to an open letter offering “solidarity and support” to the “resistance” in Lebanon and Palestine – meaning Hizbullah and Hamas. And these pledges of loyalty to genocidal fanatics have become quite common among Jews who distinguish themselves by their hatred for Israel.
How is it possible for any Jew to support those who seek the destruction of his fellow Jews? This is the question that intrigued Edward Alexander and myself as we compiled our book The Jewish Divide Over Israel.
Our contributors – including Cynthia Ozick, Alvin Rosenfeld, Menachem Kellner, Jacob Neusner and Efraim Karsh – were all too aware of the tragic history of Jewish anti-Semitism. We knew, for example, that Martin Luther’s program of terrorizing Jews originated with a Jewish convert, Johannes Pfefferkorn; and that the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy, which culminated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was assiduously promoted by a Russian Jewish author, Jacob Brafmann. We suspected that as the Pfefferkorns and the Brafmanns departed the stage, the Finkelsteins and the Chomskys made their entrance.
Today, as in the past, the conduct of Jews who despise their own people spans the full spectrum of political depravity. There are anti-Zionist Jews who peddle vicious libels about Israel. There are anti-Zionist Jews who compare the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. There are anti-Zionist Jews who support the PLO, Hamas or Hizbullah.
There are anti-Zionist Jews who collaborate with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. There are anti-Zionist Jews who defend suicide bombings, anti-Zionist Jews who support the destruction of Israel, and – incredibly – there are even anti-Zionist Jews who advocate measures against other Jews that could plausibly be described as genocidal.
It is tempting to dismiss these views as a fringe phenomenon. But not all of our targets identify with the radical left. The liberal Jewish “critique” of Zionism is exemplified by the historian Tony Judt. According to Judt’s now notorious outburst in The New York Review of Books, Israel’s ruling elite is “fascist” because it once considered killing the terrorist murderer Yasir Arafat, and its scurity fence (intended to forestall the entry of terrorists into a free country) bears comparison with the Berlin Wall (designed to prevent the escape of unarmed civilians from a communist dictatorship).
Worse still, Judt maintains, the nefarious Zionists have convinced America to destabilize the Middle East for the sole benefit of Israel, thus “alienating” its hitherto devoted allies in Syria and Iran. Such is the Jewish stranglehold on public opinion, says Judt, that Americans “censoriously rebuke” anyone who speaks out, shamelessly charging the dissidents with anti-Semitism. Fortunately for Judt, the international Zionist conspiracy was unable to prevent the publication of his thoughtful disquisition on the role of Israeli “fascists” in propelling America to war against the entire Middle East for the purpose of defending a Hebrew-speaking version of communist East Germany.
