Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

The Oaths of the Talmud

As a supporter of the Palestinian cause for justice and human rights, I am frequently attacked with the accusation of anti-Semitism. I must admit that this accusation is both hurtful and intimidating to me at times. Hurtful because I vividly remember when, as a young boy, I first heard the story of the Holocaust. I remember being grief stricken at the thought of the horrendous suffering that Jewish people had endured during the war at the hands of the Nazis. Not only did the Jewish people experience this criminal behaviour towards themselves, but they felt a tremendous sense of betrayal and abandonment by the Western Allies. No-one seemed to want to come to their aid but for a few individuals who where brave enough to withstand the fear of putting oneself at risk for a people not their own.

And intimidating because I believe there is no worse accusation than being numbered with the Nazis. The temptation to be silent and avoid any scrutiny by a hostile Zionist mob, be they Christian or otherwise, can be significant.

And yet in the end I refuse to be silent about what I see is clearly the case In Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. To be silent, to hold my tongue would, in fact, make me a person far more in league with the Nazis than anything else I am likely to do. It would be my silence, not my voice, that would condemn me as one who knew what was going on but said nothing, just as those millions who must have had at the very least a hunch, an instinct that something terrible was happening to the Jews of Europe, but said nought, keeping their heads down and minding their own business. I owe it to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to speak up. I owe it to the victims of persecution everywhere to speak up. And nothing will stop me.

Certainly, it is understandable that a Jewish person might have their suspicions raised of anti-Semitism being in the wind when a person rejects the colonialist dogmas of today’s Zionists. But the automatic association of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is one of today’s most heinous errors perpetrated by the supporters of Zionism. It does their cause no credit.

Any person today who would be accused of racism against the Chinese simply because they rejected Communism, would rightly claim that they had been seriously misrepresented. Anyone who would claim that criticism of the People’s Republic of China was, in reality, a thinly veiled racist attack on Asians would not be taken seriously. Yet time and time again our media has been complicit with the Zionists of Israel who berate all criticism of Israel as racism in disguise. No serious discussion of the important issue of Palestinian rights is allowed to take place in our mainstream media or in many of our churches.

A simple fact that would greatly enlighten most Australians, is that Zionism and Judaism are not only not the same thing, they are antithetical. Orthodox Judaism and Zionism have a long history of both ideological and physical conflict.

Zionists come in all shapes and forms. Most Zionists in the world are probably not even Jewish. It has been estimated that there are about 50 million Christian (obviously non-Jewish) Zionists in the U.S. and this clearly overwhelms the Jewish Zionists throughout the rest of the world with respect to numbers. On top of this is the fact that many Jews are not Zionists. Zionism is a political ideology, one that can be legitimately accepted or rejected by Jewish people anywhere in the world.

The accusation of anti-Semitism by Zionists whenever the state of Israel is criticised is invalid and should always be ignored. Otherwise we risk the situation of Israel being accepted as a state that is intrinsically beyond reproach. I’m sure that many of the far-right wing Zionists of this world would gladly see to it that I am silenced for all time. That is just part of life. Ultimately it doesn’t bother me, I will just be replaced by someone else’s voice. Someone else who understands that the true voice of the victims of the Holocaust cry out, “Never again,…to anybody!” and not the Zionist mantra, “Never again,…to us!”

Craig Nielsen