Iran's unlikely Jewish allies.

Iran's unlikely Jewish allies.
Common Cause
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.20.06

The American press generally viewed last week's Holocaust-denial conference in Teheran--when 67 "researchers" from 30 countries came to "express their views freely" about the Holocaust--as a vulgar outrage. Yet, for all the revulsion, it hardly did justice to what the event represents--namely, the formal emergence of an alliance between Islamists and neo-Nazis. Until now, that alliance has been largely expressed through anti-Israel demonstrations in European cities, where Islamists and neo-Nazis chant the same slogans backing Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, in officially backing far-right Holocaust deniers, the Iranian regime has given new meaning to the term "Islamofascism."

But there is a third component to the Islamofascist alliance: anti-Zionist Jews. The half-dozen members of Neturei Karta--the tiny ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist movement--who attended the conference understood its real significance: not so much to deny the existence of the Holocaust as to deny the right of Israel to exist. If the Zionists invented the Holocaust, then Zionism itself is history's greatest lie. And, in promoting the notion that the Jewish state is based on fraud, Neturei Karta is not alone; although none were in attendance, far more influential secular Jewish anti-Zionists in the Western press and in academia are also complicit--however unintentionally--in helping this Islamofascist alliance.

Neturei Karta, whose leaders have endorsed Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis, bases its opposition to Israel's existence on theological grounds--specifically, a Talmudic passage that explains how God forced upon the exiled Jews three vows, including the vow not to reclaim the land of Israel against the will of the nations. Neturei Karta believes that Zionism violated that vow. The group's Orthodox opponents counter by noting that, beginning with Theodore Herzl, Zionism sought and eventually received international support, culminating in the U.N. vote to create a Jewish state.

But that obscure theological argument hardly explains Neturei Karta's hatred of Israel--a hatred so pathological that its members make common cause with those who exonerate the murderers of their families. Indeed, beyond theology lies a deeper loathing. In declaring an end to the exile, Zionism has threatened the very essence of Neturei Karta's Jewish identity, which is to sanctify and perpetuate the ghetto. Neturei Karta is like the prisoner who dreads freedom and comes to see his cell as an extension of his being. Other oppressed peoples have produced their version of Neturei Karta--collaborators with their enemies who embrace victimhood. Few, though, have adopted Neturei Karta's extreme conclusion of sanctifying their people's damnation.

In its infatuation with victimhood, Neturei Karta reveals something essential about the psychology of Jewish anti-Zionism generally, including secular-Jewish anti-Zionism. Though they hardly share Neturei Karta's passion for the Jewish ghetto, secularist Jews who oppose Zionists do share the group's rage against Zionism for depriving the Jews of the status of victim.

For nearly 2000 years, Jews in the West not only suffered as victims but were stigmatized for being victims. For the pre-Vatican II Church, the miserable condition of the Jew in exile was proof that God's love had been transferred from the "old Israel" to the "new Israel"; the very fact that Jews were persecuted confirmed the rightness of their persecution. For the Western theoreticians of racial anti-Semitism, Jewish weakness was seen as a genetic flaw that impeded humanity's ability to cope in the jungle of life.

Now, though, the West celebrates the victim as hero. Ironically, then, just as Jews in the West would finally begin to benefit from the status of victimhood, Zionism--with its contempt for victimization and its insistence on self-defense--has denied them that privileged status.

Most Diaspora Jews are probably still grateful to Israel for saving the Jews in the era just after the Holocaust from the despair of excess victimhood. And most Jews instinctively understand that the assault on Israel's legitimacy by parts of the international community vindicates Zionism's insistence that the Jews need a state to protect themselves.

Yet, for some secular anti-Zionists, the status of victim and outcast remains a last source of Jewish identity. And so, just as Neturei Karta cannot forgive Israel for undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish ghetto, so secular anti-Zionist Jews cannot forgive Israel for depriving them of their victimhood. For those anti-Zionists, Israel itself is a kind of Holocaust denier--denying Jews the belated benefits of victimization.


Most anti-Zionist Jews are no doubt appalled by Holocaust denial. (One possible Jewish exception is Noam Chomsky, who not only supported French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson's freedom of speech but also absolved him of anti-Semitism.) Even so, the goal of anti-Zionism and of Holocaust-denial is the same: to deny the right of Israel to exist. Having helped transform the question of Israel's existence into a legitimate topic of debate among Western intellectuals, the secular anti-Zionists have proven to be a far more formidable ally of the Islamofascists than the ghetto buffoons of Neturei Karta.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a foreign correspondent for The New Republic and senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.