The "Israel is Apartheid" lie, like all Leftist antisemitism, was started by Stalinists

Here are excerpts from a 2004 article by Stan Crooke which can be read, believe it or not, at the Workers Liberty website.

It shows the origins of the "Zionism is Apartheid" lie, along with many others.

The Stalinist roots of left "anti-Zionism" 

In the 1970s the rulers of the USSR launched a sustained 'anti-Zionist' campaign, in fact anti-semitic.

No surprise. But an examination of the publications from that campaign shows something much more shocking than the fact that the old Stalinist despots were ready to use any sort of reactionary prejudice for their own ends. It demonstrates that much of what many British and international leftists - even Trotskyists - say about Israel is an indirect and unwitting copy of the Stalinists' efforts at constructing a Marxist-sounding gloss on old anti-semitic themes.

Zionism equals racism; Zionism equals imperialism; Zionism equals South African apartheid; Israel is the USA's 'watchdog' in the Middle East; Zionism is complicit with, or even promotes, anti-semitism - all these themes, now commonplace on the left, were pioneered by the Stalinists.

The core of the Stalinist argument was their old technique of 'the amalgam'. Zionism, so the Stalinists claimed, was tied up with, allied to, linked with, or responsible for, every reactionary force that right-minded people might detest - capitalism, imperialism, even anti-semitism and Nazism.

The creation of a national home for Jews was the means whereby Jewish-bourgeois hegemony over Jewish workers was to be maintained. "The powerful Jewish bourgeoisie, allied with imperialism, needed the creation of a 'national home'... first and foremost in order to keep under its influence the mass of Jewish workers".

Moreover: "In the West Jewish capital became such a powerful force that it was able to participate independently in the colonial division of the world.

According to the Stalinists: "Zionism and anti-semitism are two sides of the same coin - racism. Zionists greeted the anti-semitic policies of Tsarism in its time and also the monstrous policies of genocide at the time of Hitler."

Zionists "co-operated with Hitlerites and helped them to destroy millions of Jewish lives, attempting to save only the capitalists. The Zionists always regarded anti-semitism, and still do so, as an important means of forcing all Jews to leave their countries and escape to the 'Promised Land' in Israel".

There was, moreover, an overlap between the theories of Zionism and fascism: "As regards the theory of 'racial purity', the treatises on 'lower' and 'higher' peoples, the concepts of the 'Aryan' and the 'superman', here there is really not a little in common between the Zionists and the fascists." The theories of various 'Zionist ideologues' did not differ "at all from the views on racial exclusiveness to be found in the 'collected works' of Hitler, Rosenberg, and other fascist theoreticians." "Zionism is akin to Nazism" because "the ideologues of Zionism and apartheid are related to it (Nazism), (and) are merely contemporary variations of the myth about the supposedly innate inequality of people and races".

For the Stalinist writers, Israel was not only a sort of offshoot or outpost of the USA. It was, with fiendish cunning, simultaneously an offshoot or outpost of South Africa as it was before 1994, under the system of apartheid.

"Israel and South Africa are linked by a common racist ideology and practice, and by reactionary domestic and foreign policies... The union of the racists of Israel and South Africa is a massive threat to the African peoples and to the whole of humanity."

Facile analogies, now prevalent on the British left, featured constantly in the Soviet campaign. Zionism and apartheid possessed 'common ideological roots'. "In the South of Africa, in the Republic of South Africa, and in Palestine, close to the Suez Canal, there arose two platforms of world imperialism, summoned... to put a check to the national-liberation movement of the peoples".

Many of the footnotes for the charge that Zionism is akin to apartheid comes from a 1975 book by Valery Ivanovich Skurlatov, entitled Сионизм и апартеид - Zionism and Apartheid, published by the official Soviet Politizdat of Ukraine.

Skurlatov's book is summarized in this article by R. Nudelman:

In his book Zionism and Apartheid Skurlatov sketches the following pattern of Jewish history from ancient times to modern Zionism: even in ancient times the world needed middlemen for trade and in the course of centuries a trade clan or order formed whose most successful embodiment was the upper crust of ancient Jewish society. In ancient times this upper class had already turned into a "transnational Jewish corporation." From then on this "transnational Jewish corporation" has appeared under different guises in world history but always with a single purpose: to win supremacy over the world. With this aim in view, the corporation first created "the religion of the God-chosen," Judaism, a religion created by stealing, in its usual manner, "not only material but also cultural values, from other peoples." Judaism proved to be a very useful religion for gaining world domination, for it "very consistently generates a solid ideology of race superiority and apartheid." Later on, "Judaism's racial concept served as a prototype for European racism," first of all Catholic (because Catholicism posed as "New Israel"), then Protestant ("Protestantism is a version of Christianity pregnant with racism"), and finally Masonic ("Masonry is secular Judaism"). In modern times "the racist God-chosen prescripts of the Jewish corporation proved even more compatible with the bourgeoisie." This was particularly evident in the USA: "The Judeo-Protestant influence made itself distinctly felt in the formation of American imperialist ideology." And now, having inculcated Judaic formulas of conduct throughout the world, "the international Jewish elite already knows no bounds to its world power ambitions." But bourgeois ideologists, "although imbued with Judaic components," proved insufficiently useful for this purpose, writes Skurlatov, and so "the financial-monopolistic corporation of the Jewish bourgeoisie concluded that it was necessary to equip itself with a caste-exclusive doctrine, Zionism." Today, concludes the author, "because it considers itself God-chosen," this corporation "openly lays claim to world domination."  

This purely antisemitic drivel is literally the source for today's Leftist antisemitism, including the Human Rights Watch report equating Israel with apartheid - which, as is shown above, really means Judaism and apartheid.

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