Brendan Clifford

Oliver Sears, who is a spokesman for the segment of the Jewish nation located in Ireland, takes issue with the popular demand for the renaming of Herzog Park in Dublin:

“Seven councillors accused Israel, its security services and/or its agents of pressurising the Irish Government to intervene in the process to cancel the proposal;  a reimagining of the classic anti-Semitic trope of global control.  Conor Reddy of People Before Profit pronounced that “the State of Israel has no place in the civilised world”.  Where does he propose the seven million Jews (half the global Jewish population) go and on what legal basis?”  (Irish Times 18.12.25)

The question of where they could go belongs to the bygone era when the Jews were a people in dispersal, living in small communities here, there and everywhere in the territories of other peoples, but maintaining connections with each other as a nation, though being without a territory of their own, and thereby keeping themselves separate from the peoples amongst whom they lived.

That mode of existence was precarious.  The various peoples, amongst which the Jewish nation lived in segments, had lives of their own to live, and it happened periodically that one or another of those host nations, in their development, felt that the segment of the Jewish nation in their midst was an obstacle or a danger and expelled it.

England expelled the Jews in the 14th century.  Three centuries later Cromwellian England saw that it had a use for them and invited them back.

That is how things continued until England’s Great War—the War in which it made a bid for global dominance in order to re-order the world [1914-18, ed.]

It saw the mode of Jewish existence—nationality without territory or State—as a source of disturbance in the world.  The Communist Revolution in Russia, and the influence it was exerting on Europe, was attributed to the anomalous existence of the ‘rootless’ Jewish nation—or, as it was usually put, the Jewish conspiracy.

If that view of the matter is anti-Semitic, then Churchill was an anti-Semite, and so was Balfour—whose purpose in setting in motion the formation of Turkish Palestine into a Jewish territorial state within the British Empire, was to settle them down as a vanguard British colonial fortress against Arab development.

Jewry was formally recognised as a nation—not the Jews in any particular spot, but the whole Diaspora.

Some Jews dissented from accepting that recognition, saying that the Jews had been evolving into a religion, without national pretensions, capable of entering the life of host nations, as other religions did.  The British Board of Deputies initially rejected the Balfour Declaration, but after a brief internal contest the Board opted for the Declaration and set about restoring the traditional Jewish claim of nationality with redoubled force.

The Jews were a nation.  Nations had a right of self-determination.  Therefore Jewry had the right to Palestine.  So the attempt at a syllogism went.  Lady Hodge—one-time close associate of Jeremy Corbyn—liked to utter it.

Well, Judaism got its national territory by territorial conquest and suppression of native population—by the British State to begin with, but later by its own efforts after it shrugged off its British creator with a sharp terrorist campaign conducted in Palestine, with a credible threat of extending it to England, and established itself as an absolute sovereignty.

Where is there for the Jews to go if relations between them and a host nation becomes intolerable, Oliver Sears asks.  The question is out of date, to put it charitably.  A Jewish State was set up by force and fraud so that that question might never again be asked.

It was a state for the Diaspora.  Jews of the Diaspora have the right to go there and be citizens—a right which is denied to Palestinians who were cleared out in order to make space for Jews.

If millions of Jews still live in dispersion, it is not because there is not a Jewish State.  There must be other reasons why they live abroad.  But it can hardly be that they are refugees from persecution at home!

Oliver Sears asks “on what legal basis?”  The founder of modern Jewish nationalism, and projector of the Jewish State [Theodore Herzl], dealt frankly with the matter of law.  He said Might is Right, and Right derives from Might.  However, the Jewish State rests on something profounder than Right.  It rests on the source of Right.  It has established itself as a regional Super Power, armed with the weapon of mass destruction, and capable of obliterating all its neighbours.  That was a prudent thing to do when engaging in conquest, colonisation and genocide.

As to Herzog Park:  the present President Herzog, who is the head of the Jewish State, said he was proud to be named as an inciter of genocide by the International Court.  That was an honest thing to say.  It is true that the present President Herzog is a descendant, but the Herzog of the Dublin Park was also a good Zionist.  He was committed to establishing the Jewish State within its own ancient civilisation, separate from the surrounding Gentile civilisations and not bound by their fashionable sentiments of the moment.

The Prime Minister of the first President Herzog, David Ben Gurion, was very clear about that.  Judaism was not a variant within the surrounding Gentile civilisation of the moment.  It remained separate over the millennia that saw those civilisations rise and fall.  It was not separate because those civilisations rejected them.  It was separate because it rejected those civilisations.

It assimilated superficially, to the extent that was necessary to maintain its own existence within them, but it never lost itself within them.

If that is an Anti-Semitic view, then the founders of Zionism were Anti-Semites.

This magazine was thrown out of a niche bookshop in King’s Cross last year on the ground that it was Anti-Semitic.  The bookshop was Housmans, and it published Peace News.  

This magazine had been selling there for about thirty years, expressing the same view of the nationalist development of Jewry and its conquest of Palestine.  The only change was that it had begun to publish material from the founding texts of Zionism:  Herzel, Jabotinsky, Weissmann, Ben Gurion.

We were sorry to part company with Housmans, not because of sales (which were miniscule), but because it was associated with General Crozier, Commander of the Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, who resigned in disgust at what the British Government encouraged its irregular military force to do;  and because a Proudhonist movement, which was a useful corrective to Trotskyist Leninism when the B&ICO was being formed, centred on it.

But now we learn that Peace News stopped publication last year because of a rupture between the Trustees of the property and the old-fashioned staff who carried the flavour of the traditional Labour Left.  The running of the enterprise has been taken over by the Trustees themselves.

Anyhow:  if Judaism tended to be excluded in varying degrees in the nations in which it existed, it was also exclusive.  It existed in segments in the various Gentile nations, but was determined not to be absorbed into the lives of those nations because it had its own distancing sense of religious/national destiny to carry through to the end of time.

It has lost members on the margins all along the way to the surrounding civilisations that rose and fell:  to Greek civilisation that spread across the Middle East with Alexander;  to the Roman civilisation that absorbed the Greek;  to the Christian civilisation that took root in Rome;  and to the Enlightenment that sprouted out of Roman civilisation.  But the fundamentalist core has always re-asserted itself in cosmic terms, as a religio-national certainty beyond the passing fashions of the Gentiles.

One of these fundamental actions re-asserting exclusiveness was directed at the Greek civilisation over two thousand years ago.  It is still celebrated annually as Hanukah.  The entry in The Jewish Encyclopaedia published in 1904 begins:

“Hanukkah:  The Feast of Dedication, also called ‘Feast of the Maccabees’, celebrated during eight days from the 25th day of Kislew…”

The Maccabees were an extended family that rebelled against the Greek practices introduced by Alexander’s successor, Antiochus Epiphones, who captured Jerusalem, purged the Temple of heathenish influences, and founded the Festival of Light to commemorate the fact that only enough unpolluted oil remained in the Temple to light one lamp for a day, but that lamp remained burning miraculously for eight days and other lamps were lighted from it.

Hanukkah lamps took various forms in various places and were engraved with symbols appropriate to the place or time.

The comprehensive Judaica, published a century after the Jewish Encyclopaedia, says that:

“In modern Israel, Hannukah symbolises mainly the victory of the few over the many and the courage of the Jews to assert themselves as a people, which was the impetus of the national renaissance.”

And it comments:  

“The centrality of Judah Maccabee and his military victory, in events of Hannukah would suggest that he would often be depicted on the lamp used for the festival.  However he appears rarely until the 20th century…”

Judith, a descendant of the Maccabee family (also known as Hasmonean), was put on the lamp due to her popularity in Europe.  And the illustrations given in The Jewish Encyclopaedia suggest that fragments of the Temple were often represented.

The Judaica says:  

“Many of those motifs continued throughout the 20th century alongside newer developments in lamp design.  One was the appearance of Judah Maccabee.  In the early part of the century, his military victory reflected on the Zionist’s call for Jews to return to farm the land of Israel and defend it…”

—and modern Israeli victories were compared with the Maccabee victory.

The Hanukah Festival is not a nostalgia trip, recollecting obsolete events from the time of (as Egan O’Rahilly put it):  “Na flatha faoi raimh mo shean roimb eog de Chroist”—the princes under whom my ancestors lived before the death of Christ.  Fionn MacCumhail’s world has passed away and there is nothing in the present that could undertake its revival.  When Oisin got bored with the perfect eternity into which he had retreated, and returned for a look at the world he had left, he saw that it had been penetrated by an alien force that sapped its vitality, and he withered himself by touching the remnant of it.

But Judas Maccabee left a posterity that resisted that same alien force.  That posterity updated itself during the centuries of surrounding change, and it retains a vigorous existence.

Ben Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu are the Maccabee posterity.  The illusion of time as an objective medium of existence, which bears progress along with itself, has not got a grip on them.  (We have Einstein’s word for it, haven’t we, that time is an illusion?)

What Netanyahu is doing is what was done by Joshua—or at least what Joshua is described as doing by whoever wrote the book.  There is little doubt that Netanyahu sees himself doing what Joshua did.  And it seems that there are guides in the West Bank who will show you where Joshua entered Palestine in his ever-memorable campaign.

Hanukah keeps alive the spirit and understanding of the faithful few who guide the course of things for the many.  (Herzl had a Latin name for the active minority which takes control:  the “gestor”.)

But, as Oliver Sears says, half the Jewish nation does not live in the homeland that has been conquered for them—even though the reason often given for the conquest of that homeland, and the ethnic cleansing of Gentiles that accompanied it, was that the Jews must have a homeland where they can live as normal people.

The fact is that Jews choose to live among Gentiles, though they have a homeland, and yet they complain that they are confronted with Gentile hatred at every turn!  They continue to live as a nation dispersed among host nations, and continue to celebrate that separateness, and complain that they are not welcome.  It is therefore reasonable to conclude that, by living in exile under those conditions, they are somehow contributing to the nationalist cause.

No doubt it is not all positive nationalism.  But, since the British Board of Deputies decided to accept the British offer of Palestine in 1917, and decided emphatically that the national character of Judaism—which was in decline—should be strongly reinforced, and since the propaganda force of the Empire was put behind it, the historical combining of religion and nation in Judaism was restored as the norm.

Leo Strauss, a Jewish philosophical writer of recent times asked why, if they encounter hostility in the world, Jews do not cease to be Jews even when they cease to believe in Jehovah.  His answer, as I recall, is that it is not easy to cease to be a Jew because so many things are involved in being a Jew.  There are are material things involved as well as metaphysical.

And so the purposeful few carry the potentially indifferent many along, and the many are pained by having to cope with the response of their Gentile surroundings to the actions of the purposeful few, which appear appalling to Gentile sentimentality.  

This was apparent in the flustered response of a Member Of Parliament, who may be leader of the British Labour before long, to a simple and straightforward question.

The British Labour Party was purged of anti-Semites by Sir Keir Starmer when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn and expelled him from the Parliamentary Party, yet it seems that the new leader himself has proved to be a ‘Godfather of Anti-Semitism’!  

The fact is that there were very few anti-Semites in the Party then, but there are a great many of them now.

What has caused this great deluge of Anti-Semitism—using the meaning of the word as it was used against Corbyn?  

Dale Vince, a businessman who has contributed over £5.7 million to the Party since 2020, has said that the cause of this hostility was the conduct of the Jewish State in Gaza which amounted to “ethnic cleansing”, “genocide”, and “war crimes”.  [He is not the only shocked Labour donor:  see https://observer.co.uk/news/politics/article/donors-desert-starmer-over-first-year-failures-gaza-and-freebie-fallout ed.]

Minister of Health Wes Streeting was asked on BBC’s Newsnight how Labour could accept money from a man who said such an outrageous thing about Israel!  Streeting agreed that it was outrageous.  Attributing the spectacular rise in Anti-Semitism to the destructive action of the Jewish nation against the Palestinian refugees in Gaza, with which it coincided, was Anti-Semitic.  Such an approach was blaming the victims [meaning the Israelis, ed.] 

As for the proposed renaming of Dublin’s Herzog Park:  Let us recall the record of this Zionist hero.  Though born in Dublin and studying in Europe, he moved to Palestine in 1937 when his father became Chief Rabbi.  Here he joined the Haganah and the Jewish Supernumerry Police.  Later he became active in Israeli military, intelligence roles—becoming Military Governor of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967.

“Due to his extensive intelligence experience from his time in the British Army… Herzog was appointed the first head of Israel’s Military Intelligence branch, a position he held from 1948 to 1950 and again later from 1959 to 1962.

• Chaim Herzog’s actions in subsequent years as president were also controversial regarding Palestinians. He was noted for reducing the sentences of members of the Jewish Underground who were convicted of murdering four Palestinians in the 1980s.”

After the 1967 Six-Day War, Herzog was was appointed the first military governor of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

This is the Jewish nationalist colonist who has a small park in Dublin named after him!     

          Brendan Clifford