“Anti-Zionist facts and anti-Zionist fictions are impossible to define to everyone’s satisfaction. Given the labyrinthine history of Jews, Muslims, Christians, antisemitism, Zionism, Europe and the Middle East, everyone has their own version of fact and fiction, history and myth, persecution and resistance.”
Read the rest from Mark Gardner, here.
“…Zionism needed a stronger boost from anti-Semites than they had provided until the early 1930s. The Zionists always understood that their movement would have to be driven by Jewish fears of anti-Semitism…”
I am always amused by anti-Zionists who claim that Zionism “profited” from antisemitism. The implication being that they somehow made antisemitism happen, that if there were no Zionists, antisemitism, would never have come about.
This idea morphs into the equally false notion that Zionism profited from the Holocaust.
Both ideas are demonstrably false. Antisemitism was a reality long before the political Zionist idea was first bruited in the mid 19c and the Holocaust by murdering six million Jews deprived Zionism of a many more adherents.
Let’s assume that there was no Holocaust but instead there had been a series of Communist revolutions in Europe. The communists would also not have been very friendly to Judaism. Some Jews (say a third) would have assimilated and some (say another third) would have become Zionists. This would have given the Zionists another two million members.
Moreover, it is doubtful that the communist revolutions would have been any more successful in Europe than in Russia and Soviet style antisemitism would have kept communist Jews from becoming full members of their societies also.
Counter history always plays with ifs, but why is then it that anti-Zionist counter history is often taken as a certainty? No one can know for sure what would have happened had National Socialism not triumphed, but one thing is certain there would have been no WW2 (unless it would have been fought between the Communists and the Capitalist democracies) and no United Nations. There would have been no civil or human rights movements (these too all profited from the Holocaust). Colonialism might still be a reality since anti-Colonialism also profited from WW2. Nor would there have been a united liberal Europe.
The list goes on.
To isolate one historic event the creation of Israel and to say that it happened and only it occurred because of the WW2 and the Holocaust and to forget all the other changes these events brought about is to indulge in antisemitic fantasies.