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Peace Now: The Latest Link in the Chain of Jewish Radicalism

Editorial

Arieh Stav

Director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, Israel

Arieh Stav is the Director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, Israel,  as well as Editor of Nativ, a bi-monthly periodical on politics and the arts.

The Jews played a prominent role in the ideological formulation and actualization of two of the three main fascist movements of the twentieth century – Soviet Communism and Italian Fascism. With Lenin’s death in January 1924, three Jews and a Georgian took control of Russia: Lev Bronstein, Grigory Radomilski, Lev Rosenfeld, and Joseph Dzugashvilli. They are better known by their Soviet names – respectively: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin. The heads of the CHEKA, the NKVD, and up to the KGB were mostly Jews, from Moses Solomonovitch Uritzky to Genrikh Yagoda to Andropov. Yakov Ginzburg (Sverdlov), who supervised the expulsion of the Czar’s family to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and their slaying there, as well as the commander of the unit that carried out the slaughter, who shot the Czar in the forehead from a range of zero, one Yakov Yurovski – were Jews.

The proportion of Jews involved in the creation, planning, and management of the Gulag Archipelag and forced-labor camps was much higher than their proportion in the Party elite, where in any case they held a considerable part of the key positions. Names such as Aron Solts, Yacov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman, and Naftaly Frenkel still strike terror in the hearts of Gulag veterans. The role of Lazar Kaganovitch in the organization of the camps for people who were kidnapped for slave labor, and also in the “collectivization” process that brought the death of millions, is among the most notorious.

Jews such as Angelica Balabanoff had a decisive influence on the formation of the spiritual world of Mussolini in his leftist-anarchist period. Another example is that of Margareta Sarfatti (who edited Gierarchia, el Duce’s fascist organ). Five Jews (A. Finzi, J. Pontremoli, A. Jarach, E. Jona, C. Sarfatti) were among the founders of the fascist nucleus of the “War Organization” (Fasci di combattimento) in March 1919. Those who formulated the socio-economic concept of Italian fascism – “the state of corporations” – both on the ideological and practical levels, were predominantly Jews.

Thus, for example, Guido Jung, finance minister and a senior member of the Supreme Fascist Council. Thus also Guido Arias, the senior ideologue of the socio-economic concept of fascism; L. Toeplitz, the chief banker of Italy; and Otto Herman Kahan, a great admirer of el Duce and one of the pillars of banking and American philanthropy. The hard-core of Mussolini’s economic advisers strictly consisted of three Jewish senators (H. Ancona, A. Luria, T. Meyer). Indeed, not for nothing did Alfred Rosenberg call Mussolini “Judenknecht” (Jewish lackey).

The student rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States and France was also mainly an expression of Jewish radicalism. Emma Goldman, the Jewish anarchist of the early twentieth century, known for her analysis of sexual repression in the context of the theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, is undoubtedly the mother of the anarchist movements and of the 1960s slogan “Make love, not war.” In the 1950s the bridge between Goldman’s anarchism and the coming student rebellion was Abraham Maslow, a leftist radical who developed his own version of psychoanalysis that he termed “humanistic psychology”. Maslow is the philosopher of communal living and the spiritual father of Abraham (Abbie) Hoffman, Betty Friedan, Lenny Bruce (Leonard Schneider), Bob Dylan (Zimmerman), and Jerry Rubin – to mention only some of the Jews who were leaders of the student rebellion at that time.

The student rebellion in the United States, which in France wore the guise of Gauchisme or Extreme Gauche, was indeed, as the right-wing media in France called it, a “Jewish rebellion”. At the same time the Jews constituted slightly over 1 percent of the entire population of France. Their proportion among students was 6 percent.

Yet their proportion among the leading activists of the student rebellion came to more than a third. Within a more limited list that includes 29 names in the senior leadership echelon, at least 17, or 60 percent, are Jews. Among the four official leaders – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Krivine, Alain Geismar, and Jacques Sauvageot – only the last was non-Jewish. We may also note that the leadership echelon of the Trotskyite and Maoist organizations, such as the Communiste Revolutionnaire Ligue and the Proletarienne La gauche, consisted solely of Jews, with the help of a Sabbath goy here and there.

As one would expect, the common denominator of all these groups was (and remains) a sweeping hostility toward Zionism. This reflects the cosmopolitan principle that lies at the ideological foundation of the Jewish left. Israel’s victory in the Six Day War raised this hostility to levels of hatred among the various anarchistic organizations (e.g., Noam Chomsky’s pathological hatred of Israel).

Within Jewish radicalism one may distinguish two trends that ostensibly contradict each other. One trend is found in democratic societies and preaches the destruction of the national frameworks, the establishment, and the family. Emma Goldman and George Steiner manifest this aspect of nihilism, which views the nation-state as the root of all evil (Steiner), and liberation from the shackles of the family together with sexual permissiveness as the true realization of human freedom (Goldman). In tyrannical societies, Jewish radicalism blends well with tendencies of extreme nationalism and repression of individual freedom. Thus in Soviet Russia, thus in fascist Italy. The Jewish left has imported both trends to Israel. The Peace Now movement is the faithful expression of this mind-set, which impels it toward the destruction of Zionism. The great irony of the Israeli case is that the process of self-destruction goes hand in hand with devotion to the establishment of another state on Israel’s ruins. And not just a state, since the population in question already enjoys sovereign self-expression in the country where it constitutes a decisive majority, Jordan. Nevertheless, the selective blindness, a historical thought, and public demagoguery remain, then and always, the essence of Jewish radicalism.

Arieh Stav

http://www.acpr.org.il/NATIV/2000-2/stavxs.htm

Arieh Stav

Arieh Stav is the Director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, as well as Editor of Nativ, a bi-monthly periodical on politics and the arts. Books which he has written and edited include: Israel at the Crossroads (ACPR Publishers, 1997); Political Strategy in an Era of Chaotic Change (Hebrew, Modan Publishers, 1997); The Israeli Death Wish: A Study in the Jewish Attitude Toward National Sovereignty (Hebrew, Modan Publishers, 1998); Peace: The Arabian Caricature, A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery (Gefen Publishing House, 1999); Ballistic Missiles – The Threat and the Response (Hebrew, Yediot Aharonot Publishers, 1998), (English, Brassey’s [UK] Ltd., 1999), Israel and a Palestinian State: Zero Sum Game? (ACPR Publishers, 2001), as well as his Hebrew translations of the French epic La Chanson de Roland – Decoding of a Hidden Text, (Tammuz Publishers, 1999) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Dvir Publishing House, 2000).