Zionism as metabolized anti-Semitism
In 1896 Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). A year later, the first Zionist congress was held in Basel, which was the official birth of the Zionist movement. Although at that time, Jews from Eastern Europe were already moving to Palestine (the first Aliyah), as they were fleeing pogroms. As always and just like Wilhelm Marr’s anti-Semitic pamphlets, practice precedes ideology. Herzl’s work was a reaction to both the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe as well as the first Aliyah. Moreover, by insisting that the Jews are a nation (rather than a religious group), Herzl could merge two different mythopoetic elements: the religious myth of the return of Jews to the Promised Land and the European myth of the genetic base (race) of culture (nationhood). In this sense, Zionism shares the same race ideology as all other European nationalisms of the 19th Century.
It is thus fair to say that Zionism is both a reaction to and an imitation of European nationalist Anti-Semitism. The reaction is of course completely understandable. Jews fleeing from pogroms to places where they are not being persecuted and harassed is logical and sensible. The idea that the only safe place should be Palestine is the product of religious mythology. The idea that politics can somehow force God’s hand is of course heretical and –especially within Judeo-Christian mythology – is generally the cause of catastrophes.
By adopting the race-ideology that underscores European nationalism – that hereditary traits (genetics) generate psycho-cultural dispositions (mimetics) – Zionism did not simply replicate a structure, it also metabolized its ideological substance. The anti-Semitic axiom, that Jews are a specific race that is not European, was adopted by Herzl in defence of the stated objective to create a Jewish State preferably within a part of the territory of the then declining Ottoman Empire, that later became the British Mandate of Palestine, although Herzl was also open to the idea of the Jewish State being created in Uganda. Anti-Semitism is not merely the antithesis of Zionism, it is one of its constituent pillars. There would not have been a Zionist movement without the virulence of European anti-Semitism in the last quarter of the 19th Century.
Herzl was well educated and came from a bourgeois family. Living a relatively comfortable life in Vienna, he embraced the same kind of secular, bourgeois enlightenment ideals as most western-European intellectuals. This included a disdain for poor people, including poor Jews. He argued that it was their lack of integration into European culture and their clinging on to the Yiddish language and traditions, that made them hated by non-Jewish Europeans. Thus, for Herzl, when trying to convince European elites, it was perfectly fine to blame Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. This instrumentalization of anti-Semitism gave rise to the racist stereotype of the self-hating Jew, which is often used by Zionists to criticize anti-Zionist Jews. This is also the racist, anti-Semitic trope that governments of Germany, the UK and the USA deploy to silence Jewish critics of Israel.
One does not need to be schooled in advanced dialectic thinking to discover that there is something inherently anti-Semitic at the core of Zionism. Not only did it adopt the idea that Jews are a different race that do not belong to Europe, but went further, it also argued that religious Judaism is backward, irrational, antithetical to the European enlightenment. Herzl’s Zionism may have been pragmatically opportunistic in doing so, rather than convinced that poor, Eastern European Jews were actually inferior, but the consequence of this is that these expressions (which were repeated in his 1902 publication Altneuland), pitched Zionism as a modernist, secular, colonial project against the backward popular-religious ethos of Jewish life in the diaspora. The loathing of poor diaspora Jews was not only enabled by bourgeois elitism but also by adopting the racist ideology of anti-Semitism. In this respect, Herzl himself tactically embodied the trope of the self-hating Jew.
By metabolizing anti-Semitism as the central motivating factor for Zionism, Herzl was able to refer to Jews not only as “a people without land”, but also as a threat to European civilization. Only two decades later, this would crystallize into the National-Socialist assertion that Jews are not merely a degenerate race, but that the Jewish diaspora is a deliberate ploy to undermine the superior Germanic race. Zionism and anti-Semitism are not antithetical forces, because they reinforce each other. It is thus not surprising that even before the NSDAP founded the Hitler-Jugend (in 1926), Vladimir Jabotinsky (the face of Revisionist Zionism) had already founded Betar, as a militant, paramilitary Jewish youth movement.
Both Revisionist Zionism and National Socialism conceptualized their political-military projects as self-defence. Their “races” were under attack. But the attacks were not simply physical, they were above all cultural. That is why the defence of the race had to start with youth – their minds needed to be cleansed from the false ideologies of their times (especially those of liberalism, socialism and communism). Both movements deployed religion in a mythopoetic sense (in contrast to Herzl, Jabotinsky was not an agnostic). Both movements fully embrace an ethno-nationalist conception of race as the basis of culture. Both movements also understood military violence to be inevitable for the establishment of a sovereign nation state.
The point is not to say that what these movements ended up doing was the same. The acceleration into barbarity of the Third Reich that was by driven by the Nazi-movement was extreme; the transformation of anti-Semitism into the Shoah – that could never have happened without the active involvement of modern technoscience – is a process of unspeakable evil. Despite being a racist, violent and cynical settler-colonial movement, Revisionist Zionism did not accelerate the decline into barbarity. This decline happened much more slowly and over generations, ensuring that it maintained widespread popular support.
The current state of Israel is living proof of the interconnected histories of anti-Semitism and Zionism. By looking more closely at its history, however, we can dismiss the simplistic thesis that they are oppositional forces. They are not only structurally similar, but Zionism emerged out of the ideological metabolization of anti-Semitism. The memory of the Holocaust is today being used to justify racist, state violence against Palestinians. The violence of anti-Semitism is now transformed into the violence of Zionism. Whereas identity thinking can only structure logic through symmetrical oppositions, historical and dialectic thinking reveals their interdependencies.
Just as Zionism needs Anti-Semitism, if only to drive more Jews out of the diaspora to settle in Israel, so do anti-Semites need Zionism, to continue to propagate the idea that Jews are a separate race that do not belong in Europe (or any other part of the European empire). This is why Netanyahu is such good friends with known anti-Semites such as Victor Orban and Donald Trump. The symbiotic relationship between anti-Semitism and Zionism is not a coincidence, but a logical and empirically proven historical continuity.
This historical clarity on the origins of anti-Semitism may be very uncomfortable to those who insist that being anti-Semitic is a fixed identity with a neuro-genetic anchoring. They prefer to use the term anti-Semitic not as a modality of political sayings or doings but as a personality disorder akin to being marked by evil. However, one of the best examples of how weak this kind of theoretical position is, is provided by the biography of Wilhelm Marr himself. In 1891, he declared his regrets over his anti-Semitic thesis that Germany could only flourish as a nation if it conquered the Jewish threat. If anti-Semitism is a personal disorder, a moral deficiency or simply an evil disposition, this would not have been possible.
Anti-Semitism is not an identity, it is an ideology which is much more strategic and therefore pragmatically deployed, than the theses of “blind hatred” seem to allow for. This does not make the Shoah any less evil. If anything, it makes it even worse. The dispassionate and systemic nature of the genocide was being justified with an anti-semitic ideology that was almost as cold and calculating as the logistics, administration and and trechnoscience that enabled the gas chambers to function at such a high capacity. This is the true lesson that should be taught about the Holocaust. It is not an event caused by irrational hatred of a collective personality disorder, but by the calculated mobilization of hatred to justify something far more sinister.
There were of course also very cold, pragmatic and calculative reasons to misunderstand the Holocaust. This misunderstanding effectively stopped the denazification of Germany and enabled many perpetrators of genocide and their accomplices to never having to face justice. Had the Holocaust been understood as a calculated, cynical programme, one would forced to face the question of what interests were being served by it? We will then quickly have to engage with the phenomenon of corporatism: big industries using the state to expand their profit margins and destroy every possibility of being exposed and ousted. From this perspective, the Holocaust is an extreme example of class war on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
This may sound hyperbolic and offensive. However, if it is true that anti-Semitism was a crucial element in the consolidation of European nation states at the end of the 19th Century, and if it is true that nationalism was at that time considered the most effective antidote against an international militant labour movement, then it logically follows that the rise to power of the NSDAP which led to the creation of the Third Reich must be understood as part of an ongoing class struggle. The NSDAP was rabidly anti-communist but was also appealing to the same masses for whom communism provided a potentially viable alternative. By linking communism to Jewishness, it could redirect antisemitism into becoming a weapon of class-war, without it being revealed as such.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler associated Jews with capitalism to appeal to the experiences of growing proletarianization of the masses; but at the same time, it also associated Jews with liberalism to appeal to general opposition to the privileges of elites to do whatever they want (which also overlap with popular religious-moral sentiments against debauchery and the uninhibited pursuit of pleasure, which most people could not afford). However, the most crucial association Hitler made was between Jews and Communism. This is why the NSDAP called itself a national socialist party. The element of national is of course the complete opposite of socialism (the same goes for Christian Nationalism). Nationalism and Christianity were the main forces that could stop the onmarch of international communism. Anti-Semitism provided the necessary conduit to naturalize and mythologize this strategic ploy.
Because Anti-Semitism had become a constitutive element of class warfare, this element is also that which must be repressed. This is done by the Holocaust Remembrance Industry. By disconnecting the history of anti-Semitism from the history of European nationalism, the idea was cultivated that the latter had and has nothing to do with the former. To make this self-deception possible, the mythopoetic invention of Zionism as religiously inscribed longing for a return to the Promised Land was necessary. The fact that it is merely an expression of a secular ethno-nationalist programme, must be repressed, as orthodox Jews around the world are trying to remind us. They insist that Zionism is not only incompatible with Judaism but a form of blasphemy. There are countless biblical stories in the Old Testament that make clear that when the People of God take matters into their own hand, instead of relying on Him, bad things happen. Even His most loyal and faithful servant, Moses, who did so much to establish a written account of God’s Laws, was forbidden to enter the Promised Land because he hit a rock with his magic staff to force water out of it, claiming it was his own magic rather than God’s.
To uphold the ideology that Zionism is justified, one must also uphold the ideology that all expressions of European ethno-nationalism of the 19th Century were justified. The fact that Anti-Semitism was used by both as part of that justification, however, cannot be addressed. The fact that the interests of European ethno-nationalism coincide with the interests of the bourgeoisie must also be repressed. Thus, the association between anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, which provided the main justification for the violent paramilitary politics of corporatist parties, such as the Fascist Party in Italy and the NSDAP in Germany, must also be downplayed. This then leads to the fact that the Holocaust Remembrance Industry seems to attribute very little value to the fact that the original purpose of concentration camps was to incarcerate and destroy political opponents of the Third Reich. To acknowledge this as anything more than incidental would force one to admit that the radicalization of anti-Semitism that led to the death camps might have been itself a consequence of a need to ethnicize political opposition. Then hatred of Jews is not the cause of the Holocaust, but a cultivated product of cynical-opportunistic propaganda that justified ethno-national totalitarianism.
It is this double-deception that is the root of the current semantic chaos related to defining anti-Semitism as a legal category.
Disaffected Sociology 
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