There are articles which, upon publication, elicit the response “finally, someone said it.’ The reader is happy to find their innermost thoughts reflected on the printed page – well, the webpage in our times – by another person. This is the reaction I had when reading John Wight’s excellent essay regarding the meaning of October 7 (2023). It was not Israel’s 9/11, it was a prison breakout, a Palestinian Tet Offensive.

Let’s clarify a number of points first. The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict existed for decades prior to October 7. The Palestinians have been fighting the occupation of their nation at least since the 1930s, even during the period of British Mandatory Palestine.

Please, stop comparing October 7 to the Holocaust. The latter was an industrialised, systematic programme of racial extermination implemented by an economically powerful nation against an ethnic minority. October 7 was analogous to a slave uprising, a modern-day Nat Turner rebellion (August 1831). When the slaves rise up and escape from their conditions of degradation, the slave owners respond with terrifying and disproportionate violence against their subjects.

In fact, the actions of Hamas on October 7 can be compared with the resistance of the Polish Jewish partisans who fought to breakout of the German-blockaded Warsaw Ghetto. The Gaza Strip, since 2006-07, increasingly resembles an open-air prison, with access to food, water, medicine and electricity strictly controlled by the Israeli authorities. It is not just me stating that Gaza’s Palestinians are blockaded, it is also an observation made by the Norwegian Refugee Council; the latter can hardly be accused of being ‘shills for Hamas.’

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Israeli government’s version of what happened on October 7 is highly questionable, to say the least. No, Hamas militants did not decapitate babies, as the media supporters of Zionism initially broadcast. No, Hamas fighters did not embark on a sadistic orgy of mass rapes – a slanderously false claim wilfully repeated without corroboration by the US, Britain and Israel’s European friends.

Please stop alleging that Hamas, and by extension the Arab states, represent the new Nazis, frothing at the mouth with vicious antisemitic hatred. A longstanding and deliberate misrepresentation promoted by Zionism and its corporate partisans is the fiction that the collective Arabs are driven by an irrational hatred of Jewish people, and intend to expel Jews into the sea. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Palestinians, and the largely Lebanese militant organisation Hezbollah, have made it abundantly clear that their fight is against colonialism and racism – they have no quarrel with the Jewish faith. The late Hassan Nasrallah, longtime leader of Hezbollah, fought against Israeli colonial predations in Lebanon. The latter nation has been the victim of Israeli military violence throughout the turbulent twentieth century.

It is interesting to note, in relation to Lebanon, that Israel’s expansionist designs on that country involved exploiting the sectarian tensions built into the Lebanese political system. Similarly to the French colonial power before them, the Zionist state deliberately favoured the Maronite Christian minority, using them as a cudgel against the Arab nationalist-minded Shia and Sunni Muslim communities.

Zionism did nothing to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust

The statement above may initially seem incongruous; surely the Zionist state of Israel was founded by politicians absolutely dedicated to the fight against antisemitism? Surely, Zionism provides a refuge for Jews from the ravages of an antisemitic world? Upon closer examination of relevant history, we discover that Zionism and antisemitism are in symbiosis – they feed off and reinforce each other. In fact, Zionist leaders in Germany, during the 1930s, signed a financial arrangement with the Nazi government.

The Haavara (transfer) agreement, signed in 1933, allowed German Jews to transfer a portion of their assets to Mandatory Palestine, and agreed to buy German products. This measure undermined the anti-Nazi economic boycott of German goods being promoted by antiracist Jewish groups around the world.

David Ben Gurion rationalised this financial instrument, stating that while European Jews suffered discrimination and eventual killing in their home nations, this transfer was helping to build an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

Not only did Nazi leaders endorse this arrangement, they spoke glowingly about the underlying philosophy of Zionism. Heinrich Class, president of the antisemitic Pan German League and ardent Nazi, wrote that while he staunchly opposed world Jewry, he acknowledged that among the Jews, it is the Zionists that have a racial-nationalist conception, regarding Jews as a biological race incapable of assimilation into non-Jewish nations.

To be sure, the Haavara agreement was controversial, and attacked by various Zionist politicians. However, this transfer agreement to Palestine was amply supported by Adolf Eichmann, Nazi leader and a principal architect of the Holocaust. Traveling to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s, he spoke approvingly of Zionism, and respected the settler colonies springing up in that part of the world.

Scientist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, speaking in 1937 of the growing Zionist settlements in Palestine, suggested that only the best of Jewish youth should be allowed to settle there. He opined that Tel Aviv should not become another low-rent ghetto, a clone of impoverished Eastern European shtetl.

Reflecting a eugenicist approach, he revealed Zionism to be an ideological affiliate with Nazism, motivated by a desire to construct an ethno-nationalist state based on the European-inspired concept of racial purity. It is no secret that far right antisemitic politicians and parties in Europe look to Israel as a template of an ethno-nationalist state they are trying to build in their own countries.

As Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza and Lebanon continues, destroying medical and educational infrastructure, its actions rise to the level of genocidal. That makes a mockery of Zionism’s claim to act in defence of the victims of the Holocaust. Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), Italian Jewish chemist and concentration camp survivor, warned against the weaponisation of the Holocaust by the Israeli authorities. The uplifting story about surviving the Holocaust and finding safe haven in Israel sounds all well and good, but that narrative excludes any mention of the ongoing war on the Palestinians.

The view that the creation of Israel is a kind of moral compensation for the Holocaust makes us feel good inside, but it is patently false. This view undermines our ability to speak out against the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians.