-----Original Message----- From: Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>'Collective guilt' was the ideological justification of the occupation
>and division of Germany by the Allies after the Second World War.
then....
>'Collective Guilt' has long been endorsed by Zionists, because it
>tallies with the idea that Jews can only be safe in an independent
>state, and that all gentiles are in their nature anti-Semitic.
Jim,
This is an odd ideological jag, at cross-purposes with itself. The point of Collective Guilt was to blame the Germans for the Holocaust and justify unique retribution against that country by the victors.
A more general statement of generic hostility to Jews already had a label -- it's called Anti-Semitism. The idea that Jews needed their own state was not justified by the Holocaust; the idea was already over fifty years old and was justified by millenia of genocide, discrimination, pogroms and wholesale expulsions. The Holocaust merely played an ideological reminder role for the Zionists to use just as decolonization put real estate into play on the international scene. That a bunch of Arab groups had been on the wrong side of World War II just added to the force of the argument at the time (and remember that the 1948 UN vote was amazing lop-sided in the Zionists' favor).
Of course, Jewish brutality against its internal Palestinian minority has just demonstrated why Collective Guilt is silly; any majority group turns brutal and nasty when it is either dominated by ideological/religious fanatics and/or has external pressures that leave the population fearful and vulnerable to demagogic racist appeals.
Not to start a whole other thread (although it inevitably will), I do think the Left ideological opposition to Israel's existence (as opposed to opposition to its brutal actions) has large streams of Anti-Semetism associated with it. The justification for why Jews don't deserve their own state as much as any other nationality has always seemed weak to me.
The argument that the Palestians were already there fails, since plenty of groups have lost nation-state control to later migrants. And there were of course plenty of Jews in the Middle East long before 1948; that it was non-Sephardic Jews who were the prominent ones asserting the right to nation-state status at the time is a quirk of history that can be explained by nasty imperialist co-interests or by how beaten down most Sephardic Jews were within the region (and thus unable to act in their own name as other groups were demanding real estate). Too bad the Kurds did not have a large militant expatriot living in Europe; maybe they would not have been so screwed in the land carve up of decolonization.
The "Zionism equals Racism" UN motions are particularly aggregious, coming as it does from a range of countries that brutalize ethnic and racial minorities. Israel has lots of racist baggage in its laws and immigration policies, but to no greater extent than most countries. To be particularly singled out cannot be explained except by anti-semitism that denies Jews personhood and nationhood - which is frankly what anti-semitism meant all along when Jews were not allowed to own land almost anywhere they went. It's of course a historic nasty irony that Jews were supposed to not deserve a homeland, since they did not have historic roots - a rather hard demand on a people that had periodically been expelled from almost every country they had lived in.
--Nathan Newman