What does it mean to say that the Jews were hated and feared for no other reason than that they were Jews?

The suggestion is that they were hated for no reason—that the hatred had no cause.  

How is hatred that has no cause caused?

How are Jews known to be Jews so that they can be hated?

If they are hated for their mere existence, there must be some quality in their mere existence which identifies them as objects suitable to be hated.

Abstract existence, algebraic existence, blank existence in which qualities remain to be filled in, is not a possible mode of existence or a possible object of hatred.

If Jews are universally hated by people they call Gentiles, which means the rest of the human race—and they insist authoritatively that they are—there must be some means by which Gentiles know that they are Jews.

Karl Kautsky, the German Marxist Anti-Communist sociologist, disposed of ‘Jewish noses’ as the identifier by the discovery that most Jews do not have ‘Jewish noses’, and that they are more common among Italians.

In 1945, when Labour became the Government of the British Empire, and baulked at the Imperial commitment to impose a Jewish State on Palestine, where the great majority of the population was still Arab, despite a quarter of a century of Jewish colonial immigration, it discovered that there was a ‘Jewish problem’ in objective social fact and nor a mere propaganda problem.

Labour had been enthusiastically Zionist.  It had adopted Zionism as an ideal.  But, when it refused to continue National Government in 1945, and won a Party Election outright, and had to deal with what it found to be an objective Jewish problem on its own, without Tory guidance, it looked for ways of backing out of the Zionist project.

Two years later it foisted it on the United Nations, having tried and failed to give it to the United States.  But in 1945 the USA set up a Joint Committee with Labour to investigate the problem.  The nub of the problem was the question, What are the Jews?

The Jews were claiming that Palestine belonged to them, even though they had been absent for two thousand years.  In 1917 they had agreed to colonise it for Britain and conduct it as part of the British Empire.  They then asserted a secular right to it as an ‘Imperial right’ which, once granted could not be withdrawn.

Certain developments had been achieved under Imperial Right.  But Britain was now having second thoughts in the matter.  So what right did the Jews have to Palestine if Britain backed out of the agreement, and Divine Right was not allowable?

A number of leading Zionists tried to explain to the Anglo-American Committee what the Jews were and why Palestine was theirs by right, and they were questioned by members of the Committee

David Ben Gurion said:

“Our case it seems to us is simple and compelling and it rests on two elementary principles:  one, that we Jews are just like other human beings, entitled to the same rights as every other human being in the world…  The second principle is:  this has always been, and will remain, our country.  We are here as a right.  We are not here on the strength of the Balfour Declaration or the Palestine Mandate [of the League of Nations]…  Our case… is like that of the Jews who were forcibly expelled from their homes, which were then given to somebody else.  Those homes changed hands, and then after the Nazi defeat some Jewish owners came back and found these homes occupied.  In many cases they were not allowed to return to their homes.”   (This is from an account of the hearings, published by the Jewish Agency, p54).

Ben Gurion treats the time difference between the exclusion from Jerusalem, following a rebellion against Roman authority two thousand years previously and exclusion from properties in Germany less than ten years previously, as being of no consequence.

Anti-Semitism

Why, after all this time, were the Jews now gathering in Palestine?

“There was a great deal of talk in your Commission about anti-Semitism and many of our people were asked to explain why it exists.  it is not for us to explain.  It’s your baby, it is a Christian baby.  It is for you Gentiles to explain why it exists…  To me it seems it is a part of a larger phenomenon which does not concern only Jews, a general human phenomenon…  But I am not concerned with anti-Semitism, it is not our business.  I am concerned with the question why Jews have to come to this country, and have come not only from countries where they were physically persecuted.  They come because they felt it was unendurable that they should be at the mercy of others…  As human beings with human dignity they did not like it, and they do not see how they can change the whole world, so they have decided to return to their own country and be masters of their own destiny…”  (p56).

How did it happen that the Jews came to be at odds with the world and could only feel secure if the world made special arrangements for them, breaking the general rules it had adopted for itself?  The principle of national self-determination, from the time it had been adopted as a general principle, had been understood as applying to the inhabitants of territories whose inhabitants had a distinctive sense of themselves and wished to govern themselves as independent states.

The Jewish claim was for national rights in a territory they had not inhabited collectively for thousands of years.

Historic Rights

A “United Nations” could not be based on this principle of historic rights.  The admission of historic rights as a guiding principle would result in chaos.

The Irish national movement claimed a historic right to Eastern Ulster (though it was put in a different form).  That claim was not allowed, even though it dated back a mere three hundred years, and the people were forcibly ejected by the State to make way for colonists.

The Jews were not driven out of Palestine when the Roman authorities suppressed the Jewish State on the ground that its behaviour was intolerable.  They were not allowed to live in Jerusalem, on the ground that it infected them with fanaticism—but the rest of the Empire was open to them.  (That is how things were put in the book, written by one of the Gentile founders of the British-aligned Zionism, which accompanied the Balfour Declaration. )

Jewish Singularity

The story told by Ben Gurion to the Committee about how Judaism came to be at odds with the world can be taken as authoritative, considering when,  to whom, and by whom it was told:

“It is a long, long story.  It goes back 2,300 years to when the world became Hellenised, when Egypt, Syria, Persia became Hellenised.  Judea did not submit to that ‘superior’ culture—and it was in many respects a superior culture—but the Jews preferred to be just what they were and they suffered.  Then it became unendurable.  They revolted, they fought and they were victorious.  There was another clash when Rome became the dominant Power and we were asked to accept the divinity of the Caesars and we refused.  The most powerful rulers of the world, they were above all other people, recognised as divine persons in the whole Roman Empire, but not by us and we suffered and fought, and this time we were defeated, but only materially, not spiritually.  We defied the superior material power.  Then it happened again with the rise of Christianity.  I must be careful now in speaking to Christians.  The whole of Europe was converted to Christianity, many voluntarily, many be force; we refused.  We perhaps had more to do with the new religion than others peoples;  St. Paul was a Jew.  Nevertheless, we refused and we paid the price.  We are still paying it…  The story was repeated again with the rise of another great religion in the East, a religion to which almost the entire East was converted…  Again we refused and had to suffer.  But here I prefer to be entirely silent.

“The French Revolution asked us to renounce our being as a people.  Some Jews did it.  The Jewish people refused.  And now the last phase—what was done in this war.  I am not going to speak about that…  I and my children are happy that we belong to a people that is slaughtered and not those who look on indifferently…  We shall never forget that, never…  Not the Nazis in Europe, they are outside the pale of humanity, I am not discussing them.  There was a conspiracy of silence in the entire world…  And I asked myself, ‘Would I behave like that if a million Gentile babies were slaughtered in Europe?’

`’…Here was a people bleeding to death, a few remnants remain.  Why are they being tortured?  It is torture.  Not physical torture…  there is such a thing as spiritual torture…  Why are attempts being made to lock up that unfortunate remnant of Polish Jewry, some 30,000 Jews remaining out of three millions, who are still being massacred every day in Poland.  Why are attempts being made to lock them up there and not let them out?  They are human beings.

“Why this discrimination in your Christian world?…

“…[An] American Arab, I believe it was John Hassan, said there was never a Palestine as a political and geographical entity, and another American Arab, a great Arab historian, Dr. Hiti, went even further and said, and I am quoting him, ‘There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not’.  And I agree with him…  Arab history was made in Arabia, in Persia, and in Spain and North Africa.  You will not find Palestine in that history…  There is not, however, only Arab history;  there is world history and in that history there is a country by the name of Judea, or as we call it, Eretz Israel…  We have called it Israel since the days of Joshua the son of Nun.  There was such a country in history, there was and it is still there…  It is a little country, …but that little country made a very deep impression in world history…  This country came into the world through many wars, fought for its sake by Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and others, but it was not those wars that gained it its place.  Our country won its place in world history… because our people created here, perhaps a limited, but a very great civilisation which became the heritage of the whole of humanity.  This country shaped our people, the Jewish people…:  a very exclusive people on one side and a universal people on the other;  very national and very international…”

A book by Sir Ronald Storrs had been quoted by the Chairman to define the Jewish right to Palestine.  Ben Gurion responded:

“Sir, our rights and our attachment and our significance in this country you will find in a book, in one book alone, and only in that book.  it is binding on us.  Whether or not it is on anyone else is not for me to say—I know many Christian people who believe it is binding upon them too…”  9pp59-63).

“We came here to be free Jews…  We couldn’t be Jews in the full sense, we couldn’t be free, in any country in the world, and we believe we are entitled to be Jews…

“We here are the freest Jews in the world.  Not in a legal sense.  On the contrary, here we are deprived even of equality before the law.  We are living under a most arbitrary regime.  I know no other regime in the entire world as arbitrary as the regime of the White Paper administration.  The White Paper discriminates against us in land legislation and denies us the elementary right to the soil and freedom to settle in all parts of the country.  In spite of all that, we here are the freest Jews in the world…”  (p65).

The : “most arbitrary regime” is the regime of the Government with which the Jews made the agreement in 1917 which resulted in there being over half a million of them in Palestine in 1945, and against which they were straining at the leash in 1945.

A British Creation? 

Whatever Palestine may have been three thousand years ago, it was a British creation in 1945.  The Jews only got into Palestine in the numbers that they did because they agreed to be a colony of the Empire.  But Britain had stirred up the Arab population a couple of years before making its colonial deal with the Jews, and it had the job of pacifying them while the deal to displace them with a Jewish colony was being implemented.

The Arabs were regarded as people of no consequence.  In the division of the world into dear people and cheap people by the great Gladstonian Liberal Imperialist, Charles Dilke, in his influential book, Greater Britain, the Arabs were a cheap people who could be led by the nose, and dealt with severely if they resisted.  They resisted so vigorously that Britain had to make war on them in the mid-thirties.  When the Arab resistance was put down—and with a War with Germany on the horizon— a British White Paper slowed down the process of Jewish colonisation, and put restrictions on Jewish freedom of action, but did not abandon the Zionist project.)

Ben Gurion’s case is that Palestine belongs to the Jews because they made the Jewish religion in Judea, and the country is part of the religion, and they cannot be fully Jewish (whether as a religion or a people) if they are obliged to live in a society governed by Gentiles.  They have a right to be fully Jewish and therefore they have a right to govern Judea.

They are a people just like others, and yet utterly unlike others.  They are unique in that they formed their own civilisation and refused to blend it in with the world civilisation forged by the Romans when they adopted the humanist culture of the Greeks, and they suffered because they withheld themselves, as an exclusive people, from the open-ended civilisations that sprang up around them and spread across the world.

But their civilisation, though exclusive, static, and defiant of the world, is also universal because their God is the only God.

An Offshoot!

A particular development within Judaism opened itself to the Gentile world, was repudiated by the main body of Judaism, and became a vital element in the Christian development of the Roman Empire, but in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Ben Gurion preferred to say nothing about that.

He says that Anti-Semitism is none of his business.  It is “a Christian baby”.  But that is not what is suggested by his accounting of how the rift between the Jews and the rest of the world came about.

He does not say that the Jews wanted to be normal people, but were prevented by the others from being normal, because the others hated them for no reason, and—by excluding them—forced them to live in other ways in order to survive.  What he says is that the Jews, at great cost to themselves, kept themselves apart from the surrounding civilisation since a few centuries before Christ.  

They had a mission in the world which required them to reject the beliefs and ways of living of the Gentiles.  It was they, not the Gentiles, who made the fundamental division of humans into Jews and Gentiles—and set the Jews apart from the Gentiles.  And, as Ben Gurion said, there is “the intellectual difficulty of understanding our case, because it is unique…  There is no example or precedent of such a people.  It is a people, and it is not…  It is unique.  People usually think in analogies…”

Chaim Weizmann (who became President of Israel a few years later) put it like this in his Address to the Committee:

“Here is a group of people which has lost all the attributes of a nation.  It has no common language, it has no territory, it has no form of State, it has no forms in which it can express itself collectively—and still it has maintained its extraordinary existence—a sort of ghost nation stalking the arena of world history…”  (p7).

Later Developments

Insofar as there was a Jewish nation that was not shadowy, it was the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine/Poland region of the Russian Empire, where Jewry was itself a society, and was scarcely aware of the Gentile world—except for the occasional small-scale pogrom.  Weizmann wrote in his memoirs:

“We were strangers to their ways of thought:  to each other’s dreams, religious festivals, even languages.  There were times when the non-Jewish world was practically excluded from our consciousness…  We were separated from the peasants by a whole inner world of memories and experiences…”

The Pale se emed to exist as a secure, well-established way of life, with little alienating consciousness of itself.  It was beginning to discover itself—or to be discovered by urbanised Jews—analytical Jewish intellectuals in Petersburg or Moscow—when Britain drew Tsarist Russia into its Great War by offering it Constantinople for the taking, and brought the whole European order of things crashing down.

When Tsarism collapsed in 1917, one of the many things that asserted themselves in the ruins was Ukrainian nationalism.  One of the first things Ukrainian nationalism did was launch seriously destructive attacks on Jews—attacks different in kind from the occasional pogrom allowed by the Empire.  

The onset of democracy was bad for the Jews everywhere in Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian leader, Petlura, appears to have been a radical Social Democrat who opted for national socialism in response to Lenin’s international socialism.  He was an idealist in his understanding of possibility, and seems to have been bewildered by the exterminationist anti-Semitism set off by his Declaration of Independence.  He was supported by the revolutionary Zionist, Jabotinsky, as a revolutionary national socialist.  

Jabotinsky’s distinctive position in Zionism is that he did not pretend that the Jewish State could be established in Palestine without the forceful suppression of the native population.  He did not play semantic games in order to conjure away the people of Palestine verbally as not being the Palestinian people.  He was therefore not admitted to the official Zionist leadership then, but his outright strain of Zionism has now become dominant with Netanyahu.

In the Ukraine Jabotinsky supported Petlura, and formed a Commando group to curb the killing of Jews—which Petlura had not intended, but was the main thing that happened under his brief revolutionary government.  He does not seem to have had much success, because murderous Anti-Semitism was what Petlura’s Ukrainian nationalism was remembered for—and it was what he was assassinated for in exile in France, with the Court finding that his killer had rid the world of a bad man (as John Healey might put it!).    

Those were murky times, when one world order was being destroyed, and there was confused but vigorous conflict over what was to take its place.  All this could be let be, if we were not again living in murky times, and if much the same issues weren’t presenting themselves again.

There have been two attempts since 1918 to establish a political order in the world, which would enable it to carry on without wars by enforcing certain rules, and yet allow it to be free.  It would be too much to say that both failed because they tried to give the shadow nation—the civilisation that had resisted civilisation—a place within them by breaking the rules for them.

Britain in its first World War undertook to form a Jewish State in Palestine for its own Imperial purposes.  It gave itself a Mandate for this in the League of Nations.  It then launched a second World War, in which it damaged itself irretrievably and, when the Jewish nationalist population it had built up in Palestine turned on it and demanded independence, it walked away from the matter by handing it over to the UN General Assembly—which it knew very well had no Executive Power, which meant any resolutions passed were aspirational rather than effective.

The General Assembly authorised the formation of a Jewish State in part of Palestine—but not in the Jordan part.

In the part offered to the Jews it would have been impossible to form a Jewish State because there was an Arab population in it equal to the Jewish population.

Militant Jewish nationalists—apparently invigorated by experience in National Socialist Germany—set about cutting down the Arab population by direct action.  Massive ethnic cleansing was the first act of the Jewish State.  The General Assembly looked on.

This year South Africa took the beautiful apparatus of law, with which the UN is surrounded, in earnest.  It brought a case against Israel to the UN Criminal Court, accusing the Jewish State of Genocide in Gaza.

The World Court took the case, despite criticism by the British and American Governments.  But the Gentile world is no longer dominated by the Christian umbilical cord with Judaism.  The Court took the case, and allowed that Israeli action in Gaza was possibly Genocide.

The Israeli Ambassador to the UN faced a meeting of the General Assembly, denounced it as an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy, and tore up the UN Charter.

That was surely an act of some significance!

Brendan Clifford