This is Palestine, in Your Inbox, the only Palestine newsletter serving up Palestine insights so delicious you’ll lose your appetite for a warm glass of Sahlab. Or not 😋.

A Brief History of Zionist Anti-Semitism

The last issue was about Jewish anti-Zionism. This issue is about antisemitic Zionism. 

A vicious campaign is underway to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and it’s succeeding at silencing Israel’s critics. So let’s set the record straight:

Non-Jewish Zionist Antisemites

• In 1878, the Hungarian politician Győző Istóczy gave a speech in the Hungarian Parliament, calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine to eliminate the Jewish “threat” in Hungary. A few years later, in 1882, Istóczy proposed expelling the Jews from Hungary and became the spokesperson for the Hungarian antisemitic movement, resulting in a number of violent acts and pogroms against Jews.

• In 1881, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized the term "antisemitism" itself, and pioneered racial antisemitism in lieu of religious antisemitism. Incidentally, he was also a Zionist: he proposed sending all of world Jewry to Palestine. He thought Palestine could become a Jewish penal colony for Jewish criminals. “I will guarantee,” he wrote, “that our anti-Semitic movement will agree to obtain Palestine a second time for the Jews."

• In 1898, the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II declared his support for Zionism because it would direct the Jews, “who killed our Savior” to focus on something other than the exploitation of Christians. For Wilhem II, it would also be great if the Jews, who had “tremendous power represented by international Jewish capital in all its dangerousness," where to look upon Germany as the protector of Zionism.

• In 1905, the Prime Minister of Britain Arthur Balfour passed the Aliens Act, which placed Jewish restrictions on immigrating to Britain, at a time when Eastern European Jews were being slaughtered in pogroms. Balfour also doubles as the most famous non-Jewish Zionist in history, having written the Balfour Declaration which became the basis for Britain’s interwar policy of encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1918-1948.

TLDR: Some of Europe’s most powerful and influential 19th century Zionists were virulent antisemites.  

Jewish Zionist Antisemitism

Many 19th century antisemites and spreaders of antisemitism doubled as a “Who's Who” of Zionism’s founding fathers. Crazy, right? [warning: this section is even more triggering to Zionists].

• In 1897, Theodor Herzl published a text titled "Mauschel" (akin to “Kike”), a derogatory term for Jewish Germans connoting cheating & insincerity. Herzl believed Jews who opposed Zionism were Mauschels, who he described as a “distortion of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant… [A] Maschel’s face shows only miserable fright or a mocking grin… in wealth a Mauschel is an even more despicable show-off… and pursues arts & science only for vulgar profit.” One scholar called the diatribe "an antisemite’s dream.” (see also here).

• Max Nordau (Herzl’s right-hand man)’s best-selling works of 1880s (Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Paradoxes) are replete with antisemitic portrayals of the body of “the Jew” as circumcised & diseased, especially with leprosy. He also believed Jews were a race and different races had different inherent abilities (Jews apparently excelled at politics because of their realistic shrewdness). His ideas resurfaced among one of the most virulent American white supremacists and antisemites of his era, Madison Grant.

• Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943) believed Jews were racially pure, and to maintain their purity, they had to reject Jewish immigrants to Palestine from places like Ethiopia because of their lack of "blood connection."

• Ze’ev Jabotinsky described Jews as ugly, sickly and lacking decorum. They were trodden upon, easily frightened, accepted submission and wanted to conceal their identity. Much later in life, in a 1940 interview, he also proclaimed that Jews were a “superior race.”

I didn’t chose 4 random Zionists. These 4 men were among the most important Zionists of their era. And yet all of them internalized Jew hatred. Either they sought so hard to assimilate (Nordau) that they sprinkled antisemitic descriptions of Jews throughout their prose, or they legitimately despised Jews for the same reasons antisemitic Christians despised Jews. They believed, to some extent, the antisemitic stereotypes. That’s why they went all in on Zionism, to transform the character and nature of world Jewry.

Today, If I were to say some Jews are “a distortion of human character,” like Herzl said, or casually imply Jews have diseased bodies, like Nordau did, or say Ethiopian Jews are racially impure, like Ruppin did, or describe Jews as ugly and sickly, like Jabotinsky did, I’d be called antisemitic thousands of times on the internet. And yet these Zionists are worshiped as heroes within Zionist circles.

Zionism was born in late 19th century Europe at a time when antisemitism was all the rage. Honestly, it’s not so surprising many of Zionism’s earliest champions were products of their environment, and harbored some of the same Jew hatred as their non-Jewish counterparts.

Zionism and antisemitism are still bedfellows today . That’s going to be next week’s post, so stick around!

Stay safe out there.

-Zach