AU CONTRAIRE
By Badri Raina
October 28, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Palestinians try to put out a fire after an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Shaboura refugee camp in the city of Rafah, southern of the Gaza Strip, on November 17, 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
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 (Herrenvolk), 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.
This, at bottom, is why the Zionist regime shows no interest in either a one state or a two state solution to the problem; the Zionist purpose has always been to either push Palestinians in the West Bank into Jordan, and the Gazan Palestinian refugees far into the Egyptian Sinai.
Failing this, the quite overt idea is simply to exterminate the Palestinians in any which way they can, namely, to achieve their complete extermination.
Already, voices are going up to install settlements in Gaza as in the occupied West Bank as one tested means of ousting the Palestinians from their land there as well.
If the Nazis had sought to justify their expansionism in the name of the supremacist prerogative of the master race, the Zionists draw the justification for their now genocidal pogrom on the basis of some verses in the Torah, chiefly the Books of Genesis and Samuel, which they argue accords to them the status of the chosen people whom Jehova had meant to settle in these lands called Palestine.
Authority for the massacre of the Palestinians is drawn from the Hebrew Bible which refers to the tribe of the Amalek, descendants of Esau, who, it is said, sought to attack the Israelites as Moses led them out of Egypt.
The Amalek, it is written, occupied the Negev regions of the current day Israel, and have since come to symbolise all enemies of Israel.
Correspondingly, since Jehova enjoined the elimination of the Amalek, the Zionists argue that this gives them the carte blanche to employ any and every means, however gruesome and revolting (some 18,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza over the last year) to eliminate all those who seek to displace them from their “chosen” land.
The Zionist pursuit of lebensraum, as we are now seeing in full perspective, is not a jot more humane than was that of the Nazis.
The Differences
Hitler never had it so good as Netanyahu.
After that first episode of “appeasement” of the Nazis–the first time that word came into the currency of political discourse–by Britain and France, allowing the Third Reich to cross over into Czechoslovakia, the German war machine was to begin to encounter military opposition from European and British “democracies”.
You see, whereas the likes of Churchill were perfectly willing to let Hitler carry on with his assault on the East side, hoping that the ultimate victims would be the Soviet communist regime, they had not bargained for such things as the London bombings, etc.
In the current case of the Zionists led by Netanyahu, however, there is no opposition whatsoever from anyone but those most directly affected.
We are to understand that, after all, Israel is the only precious democracy in that blighted region full of dicey Islamic peoples.
Thus, powers who had finally felt obliged to take on the German Third Reich are today the staunchest allies of the Zionist regime, as the latter becomes the current day Nazis and the Palestinians the current day Jews of holocaust days.
Those that oppose the Zionist state are dubbed anti-semitic “terrorists”, whereas citizen groups across Europe which had taken up voluntary armed opposition to the Nazis during the second world war were properly called “resistance” fighters.
Thus it is that we never know when “resistance” fighters become “terrorists” and vice versa.
As I write, in contrast to the poor Fuhrer, Netanyahu is indeed the strongest leader in the world whom not even Uncle Sam may reprimand beyond expressing that hypocritical desire for the war to end, even as arms and munitions continue to flow to the warring Zionist state.
(There was of course that time too when such great corporations as General Motors and the Ford establishment were supplying munitions and motor vehicles to the German Third Reich.)
Much to the chagrin of devoted Muslims here, there, and elsewhere, the notion of the Muslim Ummah (the worldwide conglomerate of believing Muslims who recognise only Islam as a nation rather than the modern nation-state), the abandonment of the Palestinians by the Organisation of Islamic States, beyond politic noises of distress, seems the unkindest betrayal.
That this view flows from a rather juvenile notion of what constitutes the politics of nations and of the world remains a mere academic regret.
If anything, in the wake of the making of Israel, ironically, it was the Hindu Gandhi who was to say with bold conviction that Palestine belonged to the Arabs as much as France to the French and England to the British.
And Gandhi, the arch Hindu, was as much the enemy of ethno-nationalist Hindutva forces as orthodox and anti-Zionist Jews today are of the Zionists. Hindutva forces today see the Zionists as the role model in the project at hand, that of achieving a Hindutva state in India like the Zionist one in Israel.
And the clout of that state may be gauged from the circumstance that neither the United Nations nor the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice seems to have the least jurisdiction over that chosen regime.
Fooling nobody, of course, is the open secret that such immunity is, after all, underwritten by the complicity of the United States of America, Republicans and Democrats alike.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
Palestinians try to put out a fire after an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Shaboura refugee camp in the city of Rafah, southern of the Gaza Strip, on November 17, 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
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 (Herrenvolk), 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.
This, at bottom, is why the Zionist regime shows no interest in either a one state or a two state solution to the problem; the Zionist purpose has always been to either push Palestinians in the West Bank into Jordan, and the Gazan Palestinian refugees far into the Egyptian Sinai.
Failing this, the quite overt idea is simply to exterminate the Palestinians in any which way they can, namely, to achieve their complete extermination.
Already, voices are going up to install settlements in Gaza as in the occupied West Bank as one tested means of ousting the Palestinians from their land there as well.
If the Nazis had sought to justify their expansionism in the name of the supremacist prerogative of the master race, the Zionists draw the justification for their now genocidal pogrom on the basis of some verses in the Torah, chiefly the Books of Genesis and Samuel, which they argue accords to them the status of the chosen people whom Jehova had meant to settle in these lands called Palestine.
Authority for the massacre of the Palestinians is drawn from the Hebrew Bible which refers to the tribe of the Amalek, descendants of Esau, who, it is said, sought to attack the Israelites as Moses led them out of Egypt.
The Amalek, it is written, occupied the Negev regions of the current day Israel, and have since come to symbolise all enemies of Israel.
Correspondingly, since Jehova enjoined the elimination of the Amalek, the Zionists argue that this gives them the carte blanche to employ any and every means, however gruesome and revolting (some 18,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza over the last year) to eliminate all those who seek to displace them from their “chosen” land.
The Zionist pursuit of lebensraum, as we are now seeing in full perspective, is not a jot more humane than was that of the Nazis.
The Differences
Hitler never had it so good as Netanyahu.
After that first episode of “appeasement” of the Nazis–the first time that word came into the currency of political discourse–by Britain and France, allowing the Third Reich to cross over into Czechoslovakia, the German war machine was to begin to encounter military opposition from European and British “democracies”.
You see, whereas the likes of Churchill were perfectly willing to let Hitler carry on with his assault on the East side, hoping that the ultimate victims would be the Soviet communist regime, they had not bargained for such things as the London bombings, etc.
In the current case of the Zionists led by Netanyahu, however, there is no opposition whatsoever from anyone but those most directly affected.
We are to understand that, after all, Israel is the only precious democracy in that blighted region full of dicey Islamic peoples.
Thus, powers who had finally felt obliged to take on the German Third Reich are today the staunchest allies of the Zionist regime, as the latter becomes the current day Nazis and the Palestinians the current day Jews of holocaust days.
Those that oppose the Zionist state are dubbed anti-semitic “terrorists”, whereas citizen groups across Europe which had taken up voluntary armed opposition to the Nazis during the second world war were properly called “resistance” fighters.
Thus it is that we never know when “resistance” fighters become “terrorists” and vice versa.
As I write, in contrast to the poor Fuhrer, Netanyahu is indeed the strongest leader in the world whom not even Uncle Sam may reprimand beyond expressing that hypocritical desire for the war to end, even as arms and munitions continue to flow to the warring Zionist state.
(There was of course that time too when such great corporations as General Motors and the Ford establishment were supplying munitions and motor vehicles to the German Third Reich.)
Much to the chagrin of devoted Muslims here, there, and elsewhere, the notion of the Muslim Ummah (the worldwide conglomerate of believing Muslims who recognise only Islam as a nation rather than the modern nation-state), the abandonment of the Palestinians by the Organisation of Islamic States, beyond politic noises of distress, seems the unkindest betrayal.
That this view flows from a rather juvenile notion of what constitutes the politics of nations and of the world remains a mere academic regret.
If anything, in the wake of the making of Israel, ironically, it was the Hindu Gandhi who was to say with bold conviction that Palestine belonged to the Arabs as much as France to the French and England to the British.
And Gandhi, the arch Hindu, was as much the enemy of ethno-nationalist Hindutva forces as orthodox and anti-Zionist Jews today are of the Zionists. Hindutva forces today see the Zionists as the role model in the project at hand, that of achieving a Hindutva state in India like the Zionist one in Israel.
And the clout of that state may be gauged from the circumstance that neither the United Nations nor the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice seems to have the least jurisdiction over that chosen regime.
Fooling nobody, of course, is the open secret that such immunity is, after all, underwritten by the complicity of the United States of America, Republicans and Democrats alike.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
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