by BADRI RAINA
History offers few more stark instances of oppressed peoples copycatting the ideological predilections and political praxis of their erstwhile oppressors once they come into their own than the parallels between the Nazis and the zionists who, originating in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, emerged as a political force out of the incalculable suffering of the Jewish people.
It is germane to underline at the outset that Zionism is not the same as Judaism: where the latter is a religious faith dating back to some four millenia, the former is an ethno-nationalist ideology akin, for example, to Hindutva in current day India.
And just as those who have followed Hindu religious practices for some thousands of years do not approve of Hindutva, so also orthodox Jews remain opposed to Zionism because, like Hindutva, it is less a faith than a totalitarian theory of state.
We should recall that the right-wing RSS in India was, on record, an admirer of the Third Reich for having raised “race pride” to its “peak” (Golwalker in We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1938).
And such are the ironies of history that since after the end of the second world war and the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel, the Hindutva right wing in India has bestowed its admiration on the Zionist state for fending off the Arabs as the Nazis had the Jews.
Emerging from this, another interested shibboleth must also receive intellectual and political burial: just as opposition to Hindutva is not an anti-Hindu phenomenon, so also opposition to the Zionist state of Israel is not, emphatically, an anti- semitic marker.
As has been noted above, Jews of real religious faith are the sternest critics of the state of Israel.
lebensraum
From the 1880s onward, the driving impetus of German nationalism was the desire for lebensraum (living space).
The humiliation suffered by the German forces in the first world war, codified ignominiously in the terms and conditions of the Versailles Treaty which further curtailed Germany’s geographical spread rankled to a point that the chief inspiration for the German call to war was to extend German territories to the East by force, enslavement, or extermination.
The ideological/ philosophical justification for this expansionist agenda came from the Nazi view that the Aryans were the master race (Herenmasse), destined by virtue of their racial purity/ superiority to oust from existence the inferior races, chiefly the Jews and Slavic ones who inhabited Germany and countries to the East, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia.
The Jews were particularly a target for extermination because they were first non-Christian (it is no secret that the Catholic church had a cosy understanding with the Nazis), having betrayed Jesus, and then in control, ostensibly, of the financial heartstrings of Europe.
Out of a beleaguered Judaism was to emerge a Jewish nationalist movement captioned Zionism.
In complicity between European and American ideologues, the dreadful experience of the Jewish people was made occasion for a double whammy in 1948: by helping Zionists to grab Palestinian Arab lands the Europeans, the British in the forefront, achieved the ouster of massive numbers of Jews from Europe, and the Zionist a political state of their own.
Some 800, 000 Palestinian Arabs were externed from their homes and hearths that had continuously belonged to them for much more than a millennium.
Just to note, between the time of the first world war and the full colonial occupation of Palestine by the Zionists, the latter had come to spawn violent gangs such as the Stern and Irgun groups who often resorted to what are today called “terrorist” methods to make their point. Perhaps the first modern act of “terrorism” was the blowing up of the King David hotel in Tel Aviv, a blast in which some ninety or so people, including many Britains, lost their lives.
Further to note, one of these early terrorists was to become prime minister of the state of Israel; his name was Menachem Begin.
Since the formation of the Apartheid state of Israel, the Zionists have sought to implement their own version of lebensraum agenda.
There are some innocent watchers and commentators who think that if only the occupied Palestinians learnt to get used to their subservient existence in full measure, without resorting to their right to resist as granted by international law to occupied peoples, all would be well in that beleaguered region of the world.
Well, that is not exactly what the Zionists have ever had in mind.
From the first it has been their objective to follow the German Third Reich and ethnically cleanse the entire land of Palestine, that is, the enclave of Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of the totalitarian objective of achieving a “greater Israel” that extends from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean.
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