The Nazis may have lost the physical war and were unable to complete their extermination against the Jews of the diaspora but they won the cultural war.
After the war, Nazis were integrated into American and European society, joining the new war effort against the Soviets. The gentile nations had quietly nazified all the while claiming the victory of the so-called liberal rules based international order. But this wasn’t merely a revolution within the European and American gentile. The diaspora Jew had experienced a transformation as well.
Before the end of the war, Israel appeared to be a fleeting dream of a few wealthy Jewish idealists and their far right militia supporters. But the aftermath of the war changed these conditions dramatically. The west wanted to maintain a military outpost between Africa and Asia in the wake of the British Empire’s rapid decline to promote its interests in the region, the Zionist demand for a Jewish ethnostate reached a fever pitch, and the Jewish Question within Europe, whose contradictions violently ruptured through the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, would finally be resolved by a long desired aim of antisemites - mass emigration of Jews from Europe.
After the war, the nazified European and American nations began a campaign to mold this New Jewish Man based on their own self-image. The tactics of the colonial frontier, including genocide, occupation and land theft, tactics recently used against the Jewish peoples, were tools gifted to the Zionists by their British and American supporters. The Nazis had successfully driven out millions of Jews from Western and Eastern Europe through violence and terror, now it was the Zionist’s turn to be the killers. Our oppressors had transformed us into mirror images of themselves, and we had learned from the best.
The Zionists would take the opportunity to transform (and suppress) the global revolutionary Jewish masses into active or tactic supporters of reactionary nationalism, ethnic/racial/religious chauvinism, capitalist-imperialism, and the United States and European countries who had either sent Jewish refugees to their deaths or were participants in the Holocaust. This process took decades but the Jewish right had effectively silenced, destroyed and erased the legacy of the antizionist Jewish left. Anything remaining that even remotely resembled revolutionary socialism and solidarity with the oppressed, including the language of the revolutionary Jewish masses in the west - Yiddish, had to be destroyed or subsumed into Zionism. A significant threat to the hegemony of capitalist-imperialism, the revolutionary Jewish masses, would be largely neutralized.
The Zionists’ would be the western capitalist-imperialist nations’ greatest asset in the geopolitical region of the Middle East and North Africa, as Palestine is located in a strategic position between Africa and Asia. The invention of the nation-state of Israel would ensure a permanent ally and agent in the imperialist division of Africa and Asia. The west could test out strategies and technologies of oppression with some plausible deniability. Considering the IDF offers training to American police on how to best suppress the working and oppressed masses, it is clear that Israel like other colonies, militarily occupied territories and fascist states, operates as a ‘laboratory of oppression’ that produces strategies, techniques and technologies not only for domestic repression, but as a blueprint for future regimes across the world. There is an exchange of training, technology, and ideology between these laboratories of oppression and their international supporters amongst the bourgeoisie.
The successes of Zionism was a transition in world capitalism, where a previously unruly group threatening the dominant racial and class order (the Jewish revolutionary masses) had been neutralized and the petite and big bourgeois elements had become equal partners in the global advancement of capitalist-imperialism. Capitalism seeks to abolish and revolutionize the feudal remnants of class society and did so by transforming the Jewish peoples from a stateless, proletarianized people into a nationalist one aligned with the antisemitic nations and with their own national base of capitalist production. Classic Antisemites, European Fascism and Zionism sought to totally negate the Jewish diaspora through a mass exodus from Europe. Through fascism and Zionism, millions of European Jews fled from their homes to either die or join the emerging settler colony of Israel. But this process of negating the Jewish diaspora was not totally or evenly completed. The Jews are still largely a diasporic people living outside of Israel.
The nations that house the Jewish diaspora, for now, never eliminated antisemitism amongst the public. This has created a seemingly contradictory position amongst western gentiles - a philosemitic embrace of Israel, and an antisemitic orientation towards diaspora Jews. This has led to a revitalization of the dual loyalty myth, infamously expressed by United States President Donald Trump, that the “secular liberal” Jewish diaspora is disloyal to both the United States and Israel. Diaspora Jews are accused of “stabbing the President and Israel in the back” through a majority rejection of Donald Trump as a candidate, who claims to be best US Presidential ally Israel has ever had. Rejecting antisemitic American Nationalism is perceived to be a rejection of Zionist Nationalism as well, and is considered to be proof of Jewish disloyalty to American hegemony, white supremacy and capitalist-imperialism. Israelis also see this as a betrayal since they openly aligned themselves with Trumpian reactionary politics.
The biggest state supporters of Israel in the west all had a history of violent antisemitism, anti-Jewish discrimination, and had popular antisemitic fascist movements as they entered the war against the Axis Powers. After the war, Nazi criminals emigrated en mass to the western countries, often serving as scientists and intelligence in the emerging war against communism and were protected from prosecution. Nazi officials would become integrated into the liberal international order’s crusade against the Soviet Union, mere years after the attempted colonization of Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany. This resulted in the deaths of over 20,000,000 people at the hands of the fascists. The physical war against the Jews by the Nazis had officially ended but their war against communism had continued, now with the support of the very nations Nazi Germany had sought to dominate in the west. It would seem that they had succeeded in that aim, of domination, not through military supremacy but ideological friendship. The western capitalists and the defeated Nazis shared enemies, methods and strategies in common. More importantly, the imperialist bourgeoisie needed allies with direct experience in combating communism. The Nazis had killed over 20 million Soviets and nearly eradicated its domestic socialist movement. They would be useful in maintaining the new United States global hegemony.
At the same time the original Nazis had been assimilated into liberal bourgeois democracy and its imperialist aims, neo-Nazism would be birthed within the United States before being internationally exported. Popular antisemites from before England’s entrance into the war, such as Oswald Mosley, would attempt to continue fascist organizing and agitation after the war ended though the confrontational efforts of a Jewish led multiethnic antifascist movement known as the 43 Group would prevent Mosley from succeeding. Jewish assimilation into domestic whiteness through increasing upward mobility as a European immigrant group and into international imperialism through the creation of Israel had integrated Jews into western imperialist nations after the end of the war. But considering how popular Mussolini, Hitler, antisemitism and fascism had been amongst the American and European far right before British, French and United States entrance into the war, it should be unsurprising that they continued in their popularity after the war. It has taken decades for these neo-Nazi and Nazi inspired fascist movements to become mainstream politics in European and American society but it has happened.
The United States is paradoxically the most tolerant nation for diaspora Jews after the war, the strongest supporter of Israel, and the birthplace and primary exporter of neo-Nazism. This parallels how Germany before the Nazi rise to power was also paradoxically the most tolerant nation for diaspora Jews and the birthplace and primary exporter of both Zionism and Nazism.
Even though the United States doesn’t have the same history of violent antisemitism Europe has, though it does appear in the historical record and in recent years has dramatically escalated, the ideology and conspiracism of antisemitism has long been propagated amongst the American petite and big bourgeoisie. Many American businessmen did business with Nazi Germany throughout its reign and had attempted their own Nazi-like coup through the failed 1933 “Business Plot.” American industrialist and Nazi medal recipient Henry Ford had used his fortune to promote the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the United States, contributing to its popularity. Reverend Coughlin, avowed antisemite, had the most popular radio show in America during the 1930’s. Celebrity antisemite Charles Lindbergh, through his “America First Committee,” had attracted a mass movement for American neutrality towards Nazi Germany. The German American Bund held a 30,000 person rally in Madison Square Garden under banners of George Washington next to Adolf Hitler. The American people and the US State Department, even after public acknowledgment of Nazi crimes, would largely oppose any easing of immigration restrictions to allow Jewish refugees to flee Nazi occupied Europe. Ships of Jewish refugees would be turned back to their deaths. The United States government would even apologize to the Nazi government after the ‘Bremen Incident’ in which a crowd of antifascist socialists had torn down a swastika flag from a docked German ship during a riot in New York. There were strong sympathies amongst the American people and ruling class for Nazism and its antisemitic persecution of Jews.
These antisemitic sympathies did not disappear. The domestic assimilation of Jews, the political marginalization of the revolutionary Jewish masses, and the imperialist ruling class support for Zionism had muted these sympathies for a time but fractures were already present in the post-1945 international order’s orientation towards Jews when antisemitism experienced a major resurgence over the last decade or so.
The Jewish masses, while still marginalized amongst the Jewish peoples, are still active participants in social justice, revolutionary politics, and increasingly the resurgent Jewish antizionist tradition. Even the dominant Zionist political tendency amongst diaspora Jews, Liberal Zionism, deludes itself into believing Israel is a progressive democratic state ensuring global Jewish safety from antisemitism and is merely deviating from some established liberal norm. While this is clearly a “progressive” obfuscation of the inherently reactionary and violent nature of Zionism and Israeli colonialism, its popularity does suggest a conflict between the Jewish diaspora and the Zionist-Israeli state project. Liberal Zionism is after all, a fringe ideology amongst the Zionist settlers that’s been quickly outpaced by the growth of Kahanism and other Israeli fascisms. The intermingling contradiction between Jewish antizionists, Liberal Zionists, and the Israeli far right political establishment reflects the incompleteness of the western-Zionist effort to negate the Jewish diaspora. As long as the Jewish diaspora continues to exist, there will be contradictory responses to Zionism, including supposed “pro-peace” two-state solutionists (an impossibility that would nonetheless maintain Israeli colonialism) and even antizionism, that stand in direct contradiction with Israeli efforts to unify both the antisemites and the Jewish peoples in support of Zionist policies.
Zionists since the days of Theodore Herzl have openly advocated for an alliance between Zionists and antisemites. Arthur Belfour of the Belfour Declaration was an antisemite who personally oversaw the passage of antisemitic immigration laws meant to prevent Eastern European Jews from entering Britain. But he agreed with the Zionists on the necessity of mass Jewish emigration from Europe and saw Palestine as the solution to the Jewish Question. The Revisionist Zionists admired Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascism. The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) were a British Mandate era Zionist organization which had twice attempted to formally create an alliance between them and Nazi Germany against the British Empire, promising the yet to be created state of Israel would be an ally to Nazi Germany. This was unsuccessful, though Zionist settlement organizations would find more success through the Transfer Agreement with Nazi Germany, which allowed some Jews to flee to settle Palestine in exchange for their safe exit and the full seizure of their possessions and assets by the Nazis. Today, Holocaust revisionism is not an uncommon thing for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to spread - claiming that Adolf Hitler had no desire to exterminate the Jewish diaspora, merely expel them, and did not consider the notion until Palestinian Arab leaders had planted the idea in his head. Even when Netanyahu accurately describes Poland’s participation in the Holocaust, he ends up apologizing to Poland as to not upset western allies despite the fact that Poland did participate in the Holocaust and now actively obfuscates its role through state sanctioned Holocaust revisionism. But what should we expect from a nation which arms the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary Azov Battalion?
It is our basic belief that once this history and analysis is common knowledge amongst Jews of the diaspora, that they will inevitably and militantly oppose the ideology of Zionism and the state of Israel. The struggle of diaspora Jews against ethnic, racial and religious supremacy, capitalist-imperialism and antisemitism will inevitably place them in conflict with the goals and aims of Zionism. Zionism consorts with the enemies of the Jewish masses and must also be recognized as the enemy of the Jewish diasporic masses. Antisemitism is experiencing a resurgence in popularity amongst the imperialist nations not seen since the original rise of fascism in Europe. The Jewish peoples of the diaspora are threatened with extermination once again, with Zionists once again aligning with antisemites, and the political conditions produced by Israel threatens to isolate the Jewish masses of the diaspora from our potential allies in the struggle against racism and antisemitism. Abram Leon, a Marxist antizionist Jew who would be executed by the Nazis at the age of 26, said it was clear the fate of the Jewish masses did not rely on the particular military hegemony and political regime in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but the future regime of Europe (and I would add, the United States). The continued survival of the Jewish masses is reliant on the success of the global class struggle against capitalism and imperialism. It is the world revolution that will determine the future conditions of the Jewish masses of the diaspora, not the hegemony of Zionism in Palestine. In that same sense, the Palestinian Queation is also dependent on the success of the world revolution; The Jewish and Palestinian masses share this in common, as their oppressions cannot end without a defeat of capitalist-imperialism.
If not for Ha Shoah, would the Nakba had happened? If not for the mass dispossession of Jews in Europe would there be the mass dispossession of Palestinians? Why must Palestinians pay with their blood and their homes for the millennia of crimes by Europe against the Jewish peoples? Was the solution to the fascization and nazification of Europe really for its victims to create a vassal state for the imperialists and to embody and employ those techniques and strategies towards a newly chosen victim, a victim chosen by our oppressors in alliance with Jewish capitalists for their own imperialist self-interest nonetheless? The atrocities and crises of the capitalists and imperialists are never fully resolved by the ruling class, merely shifted geographically. Europe’s answer to the Jewish Question after the failure of Nazism to totally exterminate the Jewish diaspora was to physically relocate the problem to a new region, to encourage capitalist-imperialist, settler colonial, reactionary chauvinist and nationalist tendencies amongst the Jewish peoples of Europe to bring them in closer ideological, military and economic alignment with the European and American ruling class. Europe had attempted and failed to totally eradicate the Jewish peoples of the diaspora and so Palestine had to be offered as a scapegoat and sacrifice for Europe’s mixed success against the Jews.
The Nazis lost their physical war against the Jews, communism and Europe, but they won their cultural war against all three. Nazism, including neo-Nazism, has deeply steeped itself in the United States, Europe and elsewhere and even inside the Jewish peoples of Israel. Ghettoization and the segregated concentration of a people, seizure of possessions and assets, Master Race and Enemy Race ideology, the conspiratorial conflation of radical militants with the whole people, the use of mass media to spread racial propaganda, chemical weapons used on civilians, the forcing of an entire people into diaspora without a hope of return and the building of mass support for a final solution-type extermination campaign are all tactics the Nazis used against the Jews and now the Zionists use against the Palestinians. The Nazis won their cultural war, the present state of the nazified United States, Europe and Israel is proof of this.
Zionism must enter the pages of history as one of the most racist, violent ideologies humans have ever developed alongside Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum. Israel must fade into the pages of history as a past evil as will Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the American Confederacy, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperialist Japan, the British Empire, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Apartheid South Africa, and every currently existing empire and settler colony. Zionism must be recognized as an enemy of the Jewish masses of the diaspora and militantly opposed in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement or Jewish and Palestinian liberation will remain an impossibility.
