Yesterday, Israel welcomed a "good" anti-Semite to celebrate the US embassy moving to Jerusalem. Among those starring in the joyous ceremony was the Rev. John Hagee, described in today's NYT as "a megachurch televangelist who has claimed Hitler was descended from 'half-breed Jews" and was part of God's plan to return Jews to Israel..." The bad alleged anti-Semites include anyone, including many Jews in Israel or elsewhere, who have simply dared to question any aspect of Israel's never-ending oppression of Palestinians.
To some, the invitation to Hagee may seem bizarre. But, his deranged Hitler genealogy hypothesis aside, Hagee is not an anomaly. While Christian Zionist anti-Semites believe the Second Coming requires a state of Israel to exist---after which Jews will have to immediately convert or be consigned to Hell---the secular Nazis viewed Zionism as a movement which could solve Germany's "Jewish problem" in the same way the KKK endorsed Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad's quest for a separate state for blacks. It would make Germany judenfrei.
During the 1930s, leading Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, visited Palestine and waxed enthusiastic about the Zionist project. A remarkable documentary, Arnon Goldfinger's The Flat (2011), describes how the filmmaker learns his late grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, German emigres to Palestine in the 1930s, had close ties to Leopold von Mildenstein, Eichmann's predecessor as head of the SS Office for Jewish Affairs. Mildenstein visited Palestine with the Tuchlers prior to their emigration. Their friendship continued even after WWII.
The perverse promotion of Zionism by anti-Semites has, at various times been embraced by those wishing to have a Jewish homeland in Palestine, though, to be fair, not all Zionists approved, for example, of cozying up to Nazis. No doubt many Israelis, who otherwise ally with Israeli policies in general, might have been put off by Hagee’s resume. But there he was.
It should be noted that the Zionist movement was never embraced by anything close to a majority of Jews, before, during or after the war. In turn, Zionists had little empathy for Jews who did not embrace their single-minded goal of establishing a Jewish homeland. Even during the war, as prize-winning Israeli journalist Tom Segev, has shown in his monumental work, The Seventh Million, newspapers published in Palestine were focused almost entirely on domestic affairs. The victory of a local soccer team might be the lead story. What was happening in Europe was not uppermost in the settlers’ consciousness.
After the war, as has been documented by Yosef Grodzinsky, in In the Shadow of the Holocaust, Zionists were preoccupied with vastly increasing the number of Jews emigrating to Palestine to create more of a demographic parity with the non-Jewish population. The vast number of displaced persons living in DP camps became a potential bonanza and Zionists undertook a major effort to induce refugees to opt for Palestine. Their desires coincided with that of the Allies, who were not enthusiastic, for many reasons, including, but not exclusively, anti-Semitism, to take in as many refugees---the majority--- as wanted to enter their countries. But the Zionists, as it turned out, were selective themselves. Although old and infirm Jewish refugees from camps were most in need of a passage to Palestine, the Zionists strongly preferred the young and healthy. They wanted soldiers, workers and people young enough to reproduce. But even when refugees had those characteristics, if they were not committed Zionists they were treated with a degree of contempt for being in the predicament they were in instead of emigrating to Palestine before the war as genuine Zionists did.
These days, of course, and for many decades before, the Nazis have proven to be a useful propaganda tool when Israel has been put on the defensive for what is essentially a colonial project no different from any other in its territorial expansion and displacement of indigenous peoples. Nasser, Arafat, Hamas, have, at opportune times, been cast as the new Nazis whose ultimate goal was to literally kill every Israeli. The rare violent assault (even if hundreds of yards away from the Israeli forces, as in Gaza) is opportunistically exploited as a prelude to another Auschwitz.
Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The presence of an anti-Semite who support Israel and views Hitler as a secret Zionist in yesterday’s festivities was farcical, of course, as well as showing obscene disrespect for the victims of the Nazis. But, for the Palestinians, the tragic stage has never ended.