The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (17 page)

Whether Brenner or anyone else likes it or not, Prinz proves his authenticity as a Jewish leader, possessing a highly developed survival ‘radar’ mechanism that fits perfectly well with the exilic ideology. In 1981 Brenner interviewed Prinz. Here is what he had to say about the ‘collaborator’ rabbi: ‘[Prinz] dramatically evolved in the forty-four years since he was expelled from Germany. He told me, off tape, that he soon realised that nothing he said there made sense in the US. He became an American liberal. Eventually, as head of the American Jewish Congress, he was asked to march with Martin Luther King and he did so.’

Once again, Brenner fails to see the obvious. Prinz didn’t ‘evolve’
–
he remained a genuine Jew, and an extremely clever one, a man who internalised the essence of Jewish émigré philosophy: in Germany be a German, and in the US be American. Be flexible, fit in and adopt relativistic thinking. Prinz, a devoted follower of Mordechai, realised that whatever is good for the Jews is simply good.

Listening to this invaluable interview
¹⁰⁵
, I was shocked to find out that Prinz actually presents his position eloquently. It is he rather than Brenner who provides a glimpse into Jewish ideology and its interaction with the surrounding reality. He understood the German
Volk
and its aspirations and Prinz presents his actions as a proud Jew. From his point of view, collaborating with Hitler
was indeed the right thing to do. He was following Mordechai, and probably searching for an Esther as well. It is only natural that Prinz later became President of the AJC and a prominent Jewish American leader, despite his collaboration with Hitler.

Zionism vs. Exile

Once we learn to look at Jewish-ness as an exilic culture, as the embodiment of the ‘ultimate other’ we can understand it as a collective continuum grounded on a fantasy of horror. Jewishness is the materialisation of fear politics into a pragmatic agenda, as is the Holocaust religion. It is as old as the Jews themselves. Prinz could foresee the Holocaust; both Prinz and the ZVfD could anticipate a Judeocide. From a Jewish ideological point of view, they acted appropriately in collaborating. They were committed to their esoteric ethics set within an esoteric cultural discourse.

Zionism held out great promise. It could convert Jews into Israelites, and identify and fight the
Galut
, the exilic aspect of the Jewish people and culture. But Zionism was doomed to failure, for obvious reasons: within a culture metaphysically centred on exilic ideology, the last thing you can expect is a successful homecoming. In order to live out its promise, Zionism had to liberate itself from Jewish exilic ideology, and from the Holocaust religion. Yet it has failed to do this. Exilic to the bone, Zionism turned to antagonising the indigenous Palestinians in order to maintain its fetish of Jewish identity.

As it failed to divorce itself from Jewish émigré ideology, Zionism lost the opportunity to develop any form of domestic culture. Consequently, Israeli culture and politics are a strange amalgam of indecisiveness, a mixture of colonial empowerment with the
Galut’s
victim mentality.

Connecting the Dots

Chapter 20

Donations, Think Tanks and Media Outlets

Following the 2010 British parliamentary election, the
Jewish Chronicle
published a list of Parliament’s twenty-four Jewish MPs – twelve from the Conservatives, ten from Labour and two from the Liberal Democrats. British commentator Stuart Littlewood elaborated on these figures and presented the following analysis:

‘The Jewish population in the UK is 280,000 or 0.46 per cent. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so, as a proportion, Jewish entitlement is only three seats. With 24 seats Jews are eight times over-represented. Which means, of course, that other groups must be under-represented, including Muslims. If Muslims, for instance, were over-represented to the same extent as the Jews (i.e. eight times) they’d have 200 seats. All hell would break loose.’
¹⁰⁶

Why are Jews so overwhelmingly over-represented in Parliament, in British and American political pressure groups, in political fundraising and in the media? Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul multibillionaire, interviewed in
The New Yorker
, offered an answer. At a conference in Israel, Saban described his formula. His ‘three ways to be influential in American politics,’ he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.
¹⁰⁷

As I have pointed out earlier on, there is no such a thing as ‘Jewish conspiracy’. Everything is in the open. In front of TV cameras from all over the world, listed Israeli-propaganda author, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband gave Israel the green light for Operation Cast Lead, suggesting in Sderot that ‘Israel should, above all, seek to protect its own citizens.’
¹⁰⁸
In practice, Miliband made all British people complicit in a colossal Israeli war crime. Miliband also pushed for an amendment of British universal jurisdiction laws just to remove the threat of Israeli politicians and generals being arrested once they landed in the UK
¹⁰⁹
. Openly Zionist Lord Levy raised funds for the Labour Party at the time when it launched, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, a criminal war in Iraq intended in part to erase one of the last pockets of Arab resistance to Zionism. I cannot determine whether Lord Levy was involved in any political decisions, yet he, too, was not shy about his status as Tony Blair’s ‘No 1 fundraiser’. In the media,
Jewish Chronicle
writers David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen enthusiastically advocated the same criminal war in the name of ‘moral interventionism’. Cohen also founded the Euston Manifesto ‘think tank’ to support neoconservative ideologies in Britain.

Miliband, Levy, Aaronovitch and Cohen are all in line with Saban’s thinking: influence, donations, think tanks, media. The Saban formula is deeply brewed in the Judaic religious tradition, and in Jewish culture and ideology. Saban’s formula is informed by Mordechai
–
Saban internalised the true meaning of the
Book of Esther
. However, it goes further. As much as Jews are advised by some Judaic texts to bond with rulers, democracy in its current state has provided us with some very flimsy characters in leading political positions.

Zionism and Democracy

Milton Friedman admitted in the 1970’s that ‘free markets’ are good for the Jews. Zionists and Jewish ethnic campaigners take it further – they appear to love democracy. The Jewish state claims to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Israel’s supporters around the world also advocate conflicts in the name of ‘democracy’. Tragically enough, killing in the name of democracy is what Neocons call ‘moral intervention.’ Indeed, democracy is the ideal political platform for the Zionist influence merchant. Democracy today, especially in the English-speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions. Two such democratically elected leaders launched an illegal war in Iraq, and marched the West into financial disaster.

Running a state is not an easy task, and surely requires talent and training. In the past, our elected political leaders were experienced politicians who had achieved something in their lives, whether in academia, the financial world, industry or the military. Candidates for premiership had
curriculum vitaes
to share. Evidently this is not the case anymore. Time after time, we are left with a ‘democratic choice’ to give our vote to one or another laughable young failure: rising political ‘stars’ who have achieved little or nothing in their lives, who are unqualified to run a state. We are imprisoned by a catastrophic political system that pretends to reflect our ‘free choice’.

And what qualifications did Blair or Bush possess before taking the wheel? What experience can David Cameron call upon to rescue Britain from total disaster on every front (the financial crisis, the Middle East, Afghanistan, education, the NHS and so on)? The answer is none. Our lives, our future and the future of our children are in the hands of ludicrous, clueless characters. Indeed, the 2010 election in Britain resulted in a hung Parliament, as no single leader could persuade the public that he had the talent, the integrity or even just the aura of true leader.

But here is the news: as much as our elected leaders are totally clueless, the Sabans and the Lord Levys are far from being so. They know exactly what to do, and have been doing it for three thousand years. They are the followers of Mordechai and Esther
,
and know how to translate the moral of Purim into British and American practice.

With Purim in mind, we may be able to suggest an answer to Littlewood’s query as to why the Jews are over-represented. We are dealing here with an exilic cultural setting that preaches lobbying, influence and control. Shaping political thought is the
true meaning of the
Book of Esther
. Saban, with his remarks, is either candid or foolish enough to admit this formula in public.

The absence of a
Book of Esther
at the heart of Islam or Hinduism may explain why other marginal groups in Britain are ‘merely’ represented adequately and proportionately in British politics and media. Moreover, it is unlikely that this situation will change anytime soon. As opposed to most minorities and marginal identities in the West, Judaism is an exilic religion and Jewish identity is a product of exilic indoctrination.

Chapter 21

Truth, History and Integrity

Back in 2007 the notorious Jewish American right-wing organization, the ADL (The Jewish Anti-Defamation League) announced that it recognised the events in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred as ‘genocide.’ The idea of a Zionist organization being genuinely concerned, or even slightly moved, by another people’s suffering could be a monumental transforming moment in modern Jewish political history. Early in 2010 the ADL once again engaged with the Armenian question. However, in 2010, it was no longer convinced that the Armenians had suffered that much. It ended up lobbying the American congress not to recognise the killings of Armenians as ‘genocide’.

Following the rapidly developing rift between Israel and Turkey over the Turkish commitment to the Palestinian cause the ADL will no doubt have to change its take again. And yet, one question must be raised here. How is it that an event that took place a century ago is causing such a furore? One day it is classified as ‘genocide’, the next, it is demoted to an ‘ordinary’ instance of one man killing another. Did an ‘historical document’ suddenly pop up on Abe Foxman’s desk? Are there new facts that led to such a dramatic revision?

The ADL’s behaviour is a fascinating glimpse into the notion of Jewish history and the Jewish understanding of the past. From a Jewish political perspective, history is foreign to any scientific or academic method. It transcends beyond method, factuality or truthfulness. It also repels integrity or ethics. Following Shlomo Sand, we can argue that Jewish history is a phantasmic yet pragmatic tale that is there to serve the interests of one people
only. It engages with the basic question of whether a given account is ‘good for the Jews’ or not. In practice, the decision on whether there was an Armenian genocide or not is subject to Jewish interests: is it good for the Jews, is it good for Israel?

As Sand cleverly pointed out, history is not particularly a ‘Jewish thing’. As mentioned earlier, for almost two thousand years Jews were not interested in their own or anyone else’s past, at least not enough to chronicle it.

Shlomo Sand’s account of the ‘Jewish Nation’ as a fictional invention is yet to be challenged academically. The only opposition one can find is political. The dismissal of factuality or lack of commitment to truthfulness are actually symptomatic of contemporary Jewish collective ideology and identity politics. The ADL’s treatment of the Armenian topic is just one example. The Zionists’ dismissal of a Palestinian past and heritage is another example. Lenni Brenner’s categorical failure to interpret Rabbi Prinz’s inclination to collaborate with the Nazis is symptomatic. The Jewish collective and political vision of the past is inherently Judeo-centric and oblivious to any academic or scientific procedure.

When I was young and naïve I regarded history as a serious, academic matter. As I understood it, history had something to do with truth-seeking, documents, chronology and facts. I was convinced that history aimed to convey a sensible account of the past based on methodical research. I also believed that an understanding of the past could throw some light over our present and even help us to shape a better future.

I grew up in the Jewish state and it took me a while to understand that the Jewish historical narrative is very different. In the Jewish intellectual insular world, one first decides what the historic moral is, then one invents ‘a past’ to fit.

When I was young, I didn’t think that history was a matter of political decisions or agreements between a one Zionist lobby and another. I regarded historians as scholars who engaged in
research following strict procedures. When I was young I even considered becoming an historian.

In my formative years I blindly accepted every thing they told us about our ‘collective’ Jewish past: the Kingdom of David, Massada, and then the Holocaust: the soap, the lampshade, the death march and the six million.

It took me many years to understand that the Holocaust, the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not at all an historical narrative, freely debated by historians, intellectuals and ordinary people. As I mentioned before, historical narratives do not need the protection of the law and political lobbies. It took me years to grasp that my great-grandmother wasn’t made into a ‘soap’ or a ‘lampshade’ as I was taught in Israel. She probably perished of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass shooting. This was indeed bad and tragic, but not that different from the fate of many millions of Ukrainians, on learning the real meaning of communism.

The fate of my great-grandmother was not so different from hundreds of thousands of German civilians who died in deliberate, indiscriminate bombing, just because they were Germans. Similarly, the people in Hiroshima, who died just because they were Japanese. Three million Vietnamese died just because they were Vietnamese and 1.3 million Iraqis died because they were Iraqis.

I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start asking questions. We should ask for historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws. We should strip the Holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place. The Holocaust, like every other historical narrative, must be analysed properly.

65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask
–
why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people
stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes.