The fictions embodied in the Zionist narrative continue to lay waste to history, writes Nayef Hawatmeh* In the 60 years since the end of World War II Zionism has scored many victories to the beat of the annual commemoration of the holocaust. Every one of those victories has come at the expense of the rights of the Palestinian people to their land, self-determination and to life. After 60 years of relentless genocide of the Palestinian people Israel, and its Zionist supporters, are still capable of re-manufacturing and marketing the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany. Nor do Zionist fanatics have the slightest compunction at boasting how mighty Israel was built on the ashes of the helpless Jews dragged off to Hitler's gas chambers for, they claim, it was this horror that gave birth to the generation of valiant Israeli freedom fighters who defied all odds to found the state. Zionist rhetoric envelops all this in a religious aura, presenting it as one of the miracles of Yahweh, the protector of his chosen people. This was the cataclysm that would close that chapter of history on the moral decline of both colonialist and humanitarian Europe and usher in a new chapter the task of which is to justify an Israel that stands above any norms of right and wrong, let alone principles of international legitimacy. Sixty years after WWII and the liberation of the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps Israeli rhetoric, based as it is on the fiction of Zionist historical narrative, continues to depict the holocaust of European Jews as unique. It is the only standard for judging the morals of human societies, and stands apart from other acts of genocide that preceded, coincided or succeeded it. The massacres of the American Indians, of the indigenous inhabitants of European colonies, Armenians, gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese, Cambodians are to Zionist rhetoricians "acts of extensive mass murder against people under occupation and national minorities that accompany the length and breadth of history" as Israeli historian Anat Peri puts it. By lumping these atrocities into a single historical phenomenon she has levelled them into moral insignificance. The holocaust, by contrast, was a phenomenon of an entirely different order. There was only one holocaust, and its victims were the Jews of Europe. It is forbidden to apply the term to any of the dozens of other acts of genocide perpetrated in our times for this would undermine the stereotype of the European Jew as the sacrificial lamb of European and American racism. It goes without saying how easy this makes it for Peri and other Israeli historians to shrug off the massacres that have been, and still are, being perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Israeli-Zionist writing of the history of the holocaust is a blatant and deliberate process of the distorting of facts. That history has been rewritten and represented countless times, yet regardless of the inconsistencies with earlier versions it retains its power to mobilise Israeli society and intimidate others. In Israeli-Zionist rhetoric aimed at Europe, Europe is to be held responsible for the Nazi genocide of the Jews, to the exclusion of the gypsies, and of other peoples massacred in far greater numbers. This is not to belittle the horrors the Nazis visited upon the Jews or the need to bring capitalist Europe to account. The aim of the deliberately blinkered Israeli-Zionist rhetoric, however, has always been to retain the limelight in European discourse with the purpose of realising a range of political objectives. What it seeks, above all, is to intimidate Europe into continuing to play the role of Israel's colonialist sponsor which is why one of the persistent themes of Zionist rhetoric is that Israel is an outpost of Western capitalist democracy and, as such, the racist evils it has inflicted upon the Palestinians are no more than the regretful ills entailed in dealing with a backward people. It followed, of course, that Palestinian resistance is the manifestation of a particularly savage culture that evolved in a brutal land and a form of national culture fed by the morals of the desert and the creed of war and vengeance. Only at the threshold of the Oslo era did Zionist literature concede that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was between two national identities -- not that this led to a recognition of Palestinian national rights. The Zionist holocaust rhetoric pitched for domestic consumption is founded on entirely different premises. In this take it is the German Jews themselves who are ultimately responsible for creating the conditions that allowed German anti-Semitic nationalist extremism to spread. As Haboel Hatzair, the mouthpiece of the Zionist Revisionist Movement (founded by Jabotinsky) put it, "the persecution of German Jews was the punishment for their attempt to assimilate into a society to which they did not belong." This was the price they had to pay for not leaving for Palestine and helping build the state of Israel. The Jews who survived Nazi persecution, portrayed to the world as almost superhuman heroes are, according to the domestic rhetoric, sheep whose cowardice led them to the Nazi furnaces. Such nonsense forms part of the racist Zionist diet on which Israelis are nurtured from childhood. The contradiction in Zionist rhetoric between Israel as an extension of European core culture and value systems, and Israel as the edifice that arose from the ashes of the victims of the xenophobic and totalitarian expressions of that culture, resolves itself in an opportunistic way typical of Zionist cynicism. The assertion that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that Europe can rely on because "Israel belongs to Europe and always will", combined with the domestic version of why the Jews were persecuted in Europe, yields a convenient reconstruction of European guilt. Europe is to be condemned for massacring the Jews, not out of principle but for having mistakenly targeted a segment of the European population that had been assimilated into European core culture. It followed that to correct this horrendous historical blunder Europe has to continue to support Jewish Israel as part of its process of introspection and reconciliation with the past. Zionist rhetoricians realised early it was important to side with victorious Europe, regardless of its identity and prevailing ideology. In the 1940s the terrorist Avraham Stern, founder of the Stern Gang, had no difficulty in differentiating between an enemy and a persecutor. The Palestinians, he said, were the enemy. Hitler was a powerful persecutor. In order to eliminate any confusion, the Stern Gang's manifesto states, "it is not necessary for there to be a majority, for the world is divided into fighter or dominant races and degenerate races." There is considerable evidence that some factions of the Zionist movement, especially Zabolinsky's Revisionist Movement, only proclaimed their hostility to the Nazi regime after Hitler's defeat. Indeed, "in 1941 Stern Gang leaders approached German National Socialist leaders with the suggestion of entering into an alliance to fight the British. The bearer of this proposal was Yitzhaq Shamir". So writes Emanuel Ritey in Israel's Fighters. The Ankara document, as this notorious proposal has come to be termed, stated: "First, common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the National Military Organisation [Stern Gang]. Second, cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible, and third, the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position in the Near East." Closer to the Zionist mainstream, the Haganah paramilitary organisation maintained regular and systematic relations with German intelligence, which facilitated the expulsion of German Jews to Palestine. However, their inclinations were even shared by forces in the Zionist movement that regarded themselves as moderate. In 1933 the International Zionist Congress voted down a resolution calling for action against Hitler. The resolution was defeated by 240 votes to 43. Soon afterwards Hitler signed an agreement with the British-Palestinian Bank allowing the transfer of funds to support Zionist colonial activities in Palestine. The Zionist Movement had broken ranks with the international Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime. A closer look at Israeli Zionist rhetoric today reveals it has undergone little substantive change in the 57 years since the founding of Israel. The racist ideological underpinnings of the Zionist Movement continue to hold in spite of the twists and turns in the Arab- Israeli conflict and major changes in the international order. Israeli society is still structured by a self- reproducing, multi-layered system of persecution -- persecution by colonialist settlers against the Palestinians and, because of the hegemonic ambitions of this drive, against Arabs as a whole; national, religious and ethnic persecution by the Jewish majority in Israel against the Arabs of 1948; ethnic and cultural persecution by the dominant Ashkenazi Jews against the Sephardic Jews who, because of their non-European origins, are viewed as sharing Palestinian traits of backwardness while the Sephardim, in turn, form a spearhead for the persecution of the Palestinians. The hierarchical system of Israeli persecution is perpetuated by the nature of Israeli society, shaped by its continued determination to establish itself as an ethnically defined colonialist national entity that sustains its impetus by continually reproducing the type of nationalist chauvinist ideologies with which the Nazis justified their crimes against humanity and which form the driving force behind the crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetuating against the Palestinians today. It is precisely the closed, self-feeding nature of this system that precludes the possibility of a much needed revision of the Zionist historical narrative and its fictional rhetoric. It seems unlikely that Zionism will admit to its share of responsibility for the injustices visited upon the Jews of Europe in WWII and even less likely that it will admit to its responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians. The Zionist establishment is still performing the function for which it was created: producing human catastrophes, not preventing them. * The writer is the secretary-general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).
