Eggs In One Basket

[Violet_Crumble]

By Uri Avnery
17 October, 2004
Outlook India

About a hundred years ago, the Russian Czar’s secret police cobbled together a document they called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". The "authors" were not particularly original – they took a satire, written decades earlier about Napoleon III’s ambitions for world domination, and substituted Jewish rabbis for the French emperor. According to the revised document, the Jews are plotting to control the world, and the tentacles of this conspiracy reach everywhere.

When this fabrication was composed, the scenario was quite outlandish. In mighty Russia, which at that time included a great part of Poland, Jews had hardly any influence at all. In the German Reich, Jews were indeed prominent in several fields – such as banking, commerce and the press – but they were remote from the real centers of power. The Kaiser kept them out of the prestigious officers’ corps and the higher echelons of the powerful bureaucracy. Jews prominent in the sciences could count themselves lucky if they obtained a professorship.

In the United States some Jews were getting rich, but theyccould not penetrate the highest ranks of the economy and society.

How hollow the legend of Jewish power really was, became evident when the Nazis, after soaring high on the wings of anti-Semitism, annihilated the Jews of Europe. American and British Jews could not (and, indeed, did not even seriously attempt to) push their government into doing something to save their brethren. Both governments were afraid of providing ammunition for the Nazis, whose propaganda claimed that Roosevelt and Churchill were stooges of International Jewry.

http://www.countercurrents.org/avnery-171004.htm

[Wright Patman]

1. Jews concentrated into Israel

makes no sense to me. Right next door are hundreds of millions of aggrieved Arabs and even closer, in their own backyard, are millions of even more deeply aggrieved Palestinians.

If I were Jewish and had seen the history of thousands of years of anti-Semitism, I would not make my ethnic identity an issue wherever I lived in the world among the diaspora. The last thing I would want to do is get together with millions of other Jews in a place the size of New Jersey to give those who hated me a more convenient way at taking me out in one shot.

If others chose to make it an issue, I would downplay it and/or move. How would America have ever survived even as long as it has if the Germans, English, Irish, Norwegians, etc., had all emphasized their own ethnicities at the expense of national unity?

Flame away.

[Violet_Crumble]

2. The concept of a Jewish state does make sense...

Herzl's reasoning makes sense to me. It's after that where it all went balls-up. Herzl saw the rise of nationalism in Europe, and saw that in some parts of Europe, Jewish citizens of some countries weren't being treated differently than they had before. So he figures that a Jewish state where they're the majority instead of being powerless minorities spread among many states is the answer. There'd be a place for people to seek refuge from the persecution they suffered. Where it all went wonky was when the Zionists insisted on Palestine being their new state and ignoring the fact that another population already existed there...

Violet...