I am posting this here per the request of another user. I fixed some spelling mistakes and modified some URLs to improve accessibility and reduce clutter. There are a few conclusions that I find disagreeable, such as the anachronistic exaggeration that ‘Zionism has been a fascist ideology since it was invented’, but I have decided to leave these unmodified; the rest of the essay is too valuable to overlook.
Crosspost from: https://hexbear.net/post/1184520
A lot of this is taken from a paywalled substack article by Evan Reif who also writes for Covert Action magazine. Evan Reif wrote several exposés of Nazism and antisemitism in Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and the United States, for Covert Action magazine, so I view him as trustworthy on the subject of Zionism, and not coming from a place of concealed antisemitism.
Warning: Reif’s article has photos of historical pogroms and genocides
https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/the-fascist-zion
Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early Zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms. Here is Herzl speaking in the 1800s, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory:
If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there, we would serve as the advance post of civilisation against barbarism.
So Theodor Herzel felt not only that European people were entitled to Palestine over the people already living there (including Ottoman Jews), but that the presence of “civilized” Europeans in Israel would form a “bulwark” (forward operating base (offensive, not defensive)) against Asia, which entire continent Herzl racistly characterized as “barbaric.”
Herzl was born on May 2nd, 1860 in Budapest, Hungary to a family of German speaking assimilated Jews. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy businessman and the young Theodor was expected to enter politics or engineering by his parents. In a sense, he did not disappoint, as Herzl was destined to become the father of political Zionism. While Herzl never saw his Jewish state during his lifetime, his ideology remains so influential that even today he is considered the father of Israel.
Herzl’s birthday is a holiday in Israel, his grave is a national monument, the organization he founded is still active today and the largest mountain in the country was re-named in his honor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Herzl and his ideology remain central to Zionism.
As a young man, Herzl was a fanatic Germanophile. He believed that if Jews simply tried hard enough, they could become “Germanized” and shake off what he called “shameful Jewish characteristics.” Herzl viewed German culture and language as inherently superior to that of the reviled working-class Yiddish speaking Jews. At first, he believed that Jews should be Germanized, arguing that Eastern European Jews were so “savage” and backwards that they must learn the very concepts of beauty and nobility by studying the works of authors like Goethe and Shakespeare.
He initially envisioned his Zion as a German colony, and waxed poetic about importing German culture to the orient. However, as time went on, Herzl increasingly started to believe that Jews could not and should not assimilate into Europe, and the only solution to the “Jewish question” was the complete removal of all Jews from Europe. If all of this sounds anti-Semitic, that is because it is. Herzl’s Zionism is fundamentally based in antisemitic notions about Jewish incompatibility with gentile society. Herzl dedicated the rest of his life to his goal of a Jewish state.
In 1897, he founded the World Zionist Organization, a big tent coalition of Zionists dedicated to creating a Jewish state by any means necessary. As time went on, and the “Labor” Zionist wings were increasingly persecuted by Herzl, the organization moved farther and farther to the right. Given what Herzl believed in, this is understandable. Unlike the Zionists of today, who must pretend to have some respect for the charade known as international law, Herzl was quite open about his plans.
In the view of Herzl, Israel was explicitly a colonial project, and he toured the capitals of Europe trying to drum up support and funding for his cause. Herzl cast a wide net, he was not terribly concerned with who supported him, or why. He gladly worked with some of the most extreme antisemites on earth. After many attempts to get a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II by promising to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem”, Herzl finally got a letter saying Russia would support his proposed deportation of the Jews. He kept it for the rest of his life, treating it as one of his most prized possessions.
At the same time, Tsarist forces were carrying out reactionary pogroms all throughout the so-called Pale of Settlement, the home of most of Europe’s Jews. In 1903, the same year Herzl was in correspondence with the Tsar, over seven hundred pogroms took place in Ukraine and Moldova alone resulting in the murder of thousands of Jews. In many cases, the pogroms were incited by the Tsar’s secret police and in others the guilty were simply granted clemency by the government. Herzl knew all of this, and his continued support of the Tsarist government was controversial even inside his own movement.
In the end, it was all for nothing. The Tsar did not keep his word and Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of Jews in exchange for empty promises. Sadly, the genocidal tendencies inside Zionism would only accelerate as the movement grew. The Tsar wasn’t the only one who used Herzl as a tool.
Starting in 1896, Herzl actively worked with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After a meeting with the Sultan’s advisors in the Levant to discuss strategy, Herzl threw his support behind the Armenian Genocide, a crime so vile it had cut off the Ottomans from European loans. Herzl believed that he could jump in to fill that gap, offering to pay off the empire’s increasing debts using funds raised from European Zionists in exchange for permission to start a colony in Palestine.
Although he found almost no support even inside the World Zionist Council, Herzl spent 5 years touring Europe, speaking, raising funds and writing articles in support of Turkey’s extermination of the Armenian people. Herzl cast the crumbling empire as a historical ally of the Jews and one they should support. He called the Ottomans civilized and decent people, justified in their actions due to the allegedly backwards and violent ways of the subhuman Armenians. He was even awarded a medal by the Grand Vizier in Istanbul, in commemoration of his loyal service to the Ottoman Empire.
In 1901, Herzl finally got his long-awaited meeting with the Sultan, who rejected his proposal out of hand. Once again, Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for words on paper. Today, Herzl’s “civilized” slaughter is viewed as an act of genocide by all credible historians and groups as diverse as the United Nations, the United States Government, the European Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, who specifically called it “the blueprint of the Holocaust.”
With his options dwindling, Herzl even turned to Cecil Rhodes, the openly white supremacist founder of the unrecognized apartheid state of Rhodesia to ask for his advice and blessing to colonize Palestine. Although his efforts amounted to nothing, the ideological connections remained, and the state of Israel became a close ally of Rhodesia. At one point, Israel was one of the only countries willing to sell weapons and licenses to its fellow apartheid states. Israel even collaborated with apartheid South Africa on its nuclear program, a direct violation of international law which was never punished.
“You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial” - Herzl in a letter to Cecil Rhodes
At best, Herzl represents the sort of reactionary, callous “realpolitik” that the state of Israel still embraces today. At worst, he was a genocidal racist willing to support even the vilest crimes to advance his movement. When the rest of his actions are considered, it appears the latter is much more likely. Herzl’s actions are those of a man who did not just sit idly by and watch genocide happen, but rather those of a man who viewed the genocide as a cornerstone of his ideology. The simple reality is Theodor Herzl was a reactionary antisemite who openly called for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while simultaneously calling for the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. He viewed both of these ends as codependent upon each other.
While this sounds contradictory, this is only because most people have simply accepted the historical premises of the Zionist movement without question due to decades of well-funded propaganda.
Herzl’s antisemitism was rooted first in a deep, intense classism. In order to understand this fully, we need some historical background. Herzl was a German speaking assimilated Jew from a wealthy merchant family. He did not experience any of the hardship which defined the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Europe. Rather, Herzl’s family willingly sold out their fellow Jews for money and status, using the poor Yiddish speaking Jews as a sort of human shield to protect themselves from the predictions of their German allies. When it came time to create his “Jewish” state, Herzl sought to portray himself and his handful of wealthy allies as “the good ones” while the rest of the Jews were little more than vermin to be exterminated.
The vast majority of the Europe’s Jewry were Yiddish speaking workers and peasants who were restricted by law from entering most professions to keep them poor and easily exploited. The Yiddish Jews had been expelled from all their previous homes in Europe and were eventually chased into the eastern part of what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but today is part of seven countries, mostly Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The commonwealth was much friendlier to Jews than most of its European counterparts, and so the region was quickly settled by Jews fleeing oppression elsewhere. After Poland was defeated and partitioned in 1791, most of this territory and the people living there came under the control of the violently antisemitic Russian Empire.
Tsarina Catherine’s regime had recently conquered former Ottoman territories in Crimea and the Black Sea region. These lands were combined with the recent acquisitions from Poland to form what became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews were allowed to settle and do business in this land, but nowhere else in the empire. All other Russian Jews were violently expelled from their homes and sent to settle the Pale. The plan was that the Jews would serve as a buffer against Ottoman expansion while keeping them away from the Orthodox heartland of the Russian Empire.
Their lives were not easy, as the Pale of Settlement was more of a trap than a gift. Jews were not allowed to own land inside the Pale, meaning that to live and do business they had to rent from gentiles. They were also kept at first from the major urban centers of Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta, forcing them into agricultural work in rural areas.
In practice, the system was slavery in all but name. Jews were often forced to buy or rent tools at usurious prices to work land that did not belong to them, thereby keeping them permanently bound in debt. This was the origin of the Kulak, a parasitic class of peasant landlords which emerged specifically to exploit Jews and siphon off their wealth into the coffers of the Tsar.
Despite all this, a strong Yiddish speaking Jewish culture existed in the Pale. They had a long, rich heritage, maintaining their own traditions and culture even in the face of centuries of violent repression. They refused to assimilate as Herzl’s family had, remaining proudly and defiantly Jewish. It was these people, the so-called “Ostjuden”, in whom Herzl saw all the lies of antisemites made flesh.
Herzl even borrowed their language. In 1897 he released an unhinged antisemitic rant entitled “Mauschel” (a German racial slur so vile I will not translate it), where he branded the long suffering Ostjuden with the same irons their tormentors had. To Herzl, the Mauschel was everything he was not. His type of Jew was the only real Jew, while the Mauschel was nothing more than vermin.
The Mauschel was simultaneously lazy and greedy. The (rich, assimilated) Jew was hard working and charitable. The Mauschel was stupid and backwards, while the Jew was educated and cultured. The Mauschel was “something unspeakably vile” while the Jew was upright and upstanding. Most importantly, the Mauschel was a weak and pathetic creature who had meekly gone to the slaughter, while Herzl’s Jew was a mighty warrior who would never submit.
The only problem is, Herzl’s new Jewish man was not real. The Ostjuden were, and at a population of around five million, they constituted 40% of the world’s Jews and around 80% of Europe’s. Therefore, to call for the extermination of the so-called Mauschel was to call for the extermination of the Jews. Herzl’s ideology assumes that everything antisemites said about Jews is true, and the only solution is their complete extermination. Just like the fascists that would come after him, he sought to create a new type of man, the so called “Israeli” from the ashes of the old.
Herzl particularly despised Yiddish, the diaspora language of the Ostjuden. At first, he favored its replacement with German, then the modern reconstructed Hebrew. Since Herzl was a classist first, he viewed Yiddish and its speakers as being inherently uncivilized and inferior, once again finding himself in alignment with his fellow antisemites.
Regardless of what antisemites believe, Yiddish was and is a vibrant, living language with a rich history tied intrinsically to the history of its many speakers. The history of Yiddish very much is the history of the Jews. For centuries, the Yiddish was the voice of the masses of Jews, rather than elites such as Herzl. It was in Yiddish, not Hebrew or German which the Jewish people recorded their hopes and dreams, reflected on their joy and sorrow and more importantly, resisted continued efforts from the European powers to break their culture via assimilation. Yiddish has a long history, a vast corpus of work and like the Jews themselves, it is no lesser for its roots.
Herzl had an interesting plan for the destruction of the Jews, he wanted to sell them out to antisemites to fund his operations. Not only would this liquidate the property of the Jews of Europe, but their deaths could then be used as propaganda for the Zionist movement. This would, of course, constitute an act of genocide, but for Herzl that was a small price to pay to create his promised land. This strategy of collaboration to fan the flames of antisemitism and thereby spur immigration to Israel has remained a cornerstone of Israeli policy, as has the violent hatred of any Jews who do not conform to Herzl’s particular idea of what an “Israelite” should be. Herzl said, quote:
It would be excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.
While Herzl died in 1904, his antisemitism outlived him. The state founded with his ideology has remained a violently antisemitic state. The Zionists who came after Herzl took his antisemitic ideology to its logical extreme. One of the greatest ironies of the Zionist movement is that despite basing their entire existence on the Holocaust, the Zionists of the time were enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler and his final solution to the same Ostjuden “problem” Herzl decried.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany and began their long planned and promised extermination of the Jews, in full view of the world and its people, Zionists the world over viewed the Nazi regime as the vindication of their ideology. Now, there was finally a European leader who preached the same vile antisemitic doctrine as Herzl. As their goals regarding the extermination of the Ostjuden were aligned, most Zionists actively supported the Nazis. Even the “mainstream” Haganah movement actively collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Not only did they negotiate with Hitler to achieve Herzl’s dream of deporting the Jews, but some of them also even took up arms in support of the Reich.
One of the largest of such groups was a Zionist terrorist organization called “Lehi”, which was split from the slightly less radical Irgun by Avraham Stern in 1940. The split was caused by Stern’s support of Hitler over the British, who ruled the mandate of Palestine at the time. Stern’s reasoning was simple. Hitler was an enemy of the “Mauschel”, not the Israelis. Lehi contacted the Nazis almost immediately after their formation. The two sides met in Beirut, where Lehi delivered a letter from Stern outlining his plans. He proposed that Lehi actively enter the war on the side of the Axis, saying “the German worldview and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people” were closely aligned.
“The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a totalitarian national basis, in an alliance relationship with the German Reich, is compatible with the preservation of German power.” — Avraham Stern
The Nazis ignored the letter, but that was not enough to dissuade either Lehi or Stern. Even with nothing in return, they still took up arms in support of the Reich, hoping that they could prove themselves worthy to their fellow fascists through propaganda of the deed.
Lehi embarked on a years long terrorist campaign, marked not only by assassinations and bombings (including a letter bombing campaign targeting the British government) but also the brutal depopulation of dozens of Palestinian settlements, perhaps an intentional echo to the violence their Nazi heroes inflicted on the Ostjuden in Europe. Although Stern died fighting for Hitler in 1942, the gang was not snuffed out until 1948.
Despite the Israeli government’s public condemnation, most of Lehi was rolled into the security structures of the new state, where they formed the nucleus of the Mossad. One of Lehi’s senior commanders Yizhak Shamir would even serve as Israel’s 7th prime minister. It seems that Lehi’s ideology was not a problem for the mainstream Zionists, only their targets.
Sadly, the Israeli government’s violence towards Jews did not end there. With the fascists deputized into brutal secret police force to rival their heroes in the Gestapo, the so-called Jewish state still violently oppresses any Jew who does not fit their very particular ideal of what an “Israeli” should be.
As Zionists began to settle Palestine, they encountered an unexpected problem that threatened to derail their entire project. Namely, there were already Jews living there. The bedrock of the Zionist ideology is the idea that after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE, all the Jews either left or were expelled from the Levant, leading to over a millennium of wandering Europe in search of a new home.
The reality is not so simple. While there was a mass expulsion of Jews, many of them remained in the Middle East. Of those, a great deal remained Jewish while others converted to different religions, such as Christianity or Islam, ironically making them Palestinian in the eyes of the fascist Israeli state.
When the Europeans began to settle Palestine, these so called “Mizrahi” Jews (a racial slur created by the antisemitic Zionists to describe them, while they referred to themselves simply as Jews) posed both a practical and an ideological problem for the fascists. Not only did they have land that the European settlers wanted, but their very existence was proof that Zionism was based on mythology rather than reality.
The response from the settlers was about what you would expect. Just like their idols in Germany, the Zionists put Jews into ghettos. This time, however, the Zionists were inspired not just by Herzl and Hitler, but by the antisemites who came before them.
The strategy regarding the Mizrahi is virtually identical to the strategy used by the Tsar to oppress and rob the Ostjuden with Herzl’s support. After the Palestinians were murdered or expelled, the fascists used Mizrahi as their shock troops, settling them by force into the newly stolen land.
However, the Mizrahi were not allowed to own the land, only to live there. They were considered squatters under the euphemistic “Abandoned Property Law” and could therefore be extorted and evicted at will. This created a system wherein the European settlers could exploit a permanent Jewish underclass, thereby creating almost the same dynamics as existed inside the Pale of Settlement.
While all of this was going on, the Europeans also embarked on policies of cultural genocide against their fellow Jews, stealing Mizrahi children to be raised by “civilized” Europeans. Despite the Zionist entity openly admitting to this policy, no action has been taken whatsoever.
None of this was accidental, it was simply the logical conclusion of an inherently antisemitic ideology. Policies of systematic discrimination towards the so-called Mizrahi Jews continue to this day. The racism against the original Jews by European settlers is so severe that Israeli schools were segregated by law until 2010.
As we can see, the Zionists are masters of projection. When they accuse their enemies of a crime, it is likely because they are doing the same thing, and simply assume their enemies are as brutal and racist as they are. Even when they accuse Hamas of supporting ISIS, they are speaking as a country who openly supported the Islamic state.
These policies have not changed, even today the Zionists are openly carrying out yet another genocide in Gaza. As always, they make no effort to hide their crimes, rather they brag and bluster endlessly about them. Today, rather than seeking the support of Adolf Hitler and Cecil Rhodes, their patrons are men like Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak. The core ideology of Zionism has not changed, only the language used to justify their crimes. Zionism has been a fascist ideology since it was invented by Theodor Herzl, and it remains one today.