Rabbi Ahron Cohen At Birmingham University

ZIONISM VS. JUDAISM

by “Jews for Justice in the Middle East”
http://www.cactus48.com/holocaust.html

  • Shamir proposes an alliance with the Nazis

"As late as 1941, the Zionist group LEHI, one of whose leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, was later to become a prime minister of Israel, approached the Nazis, using the name of its parent organization, the Irgun(NMO)…[The proposal stated:] ‘The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian Pd bound by a treaty with the German Reich would be in the interests of strengthening the future German nation of power in the Near East…The NMO in Palestine offers to take an active part in the war on Germany’s side’…The Nazis rejected this proposal for an alliance because, it is reported, they considered LEHI’s military power ‘negligible.’ " Allan Brownfield in “The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs”, July/August 1998.

  • Wasn’t the main goal of Zionism to save Jews from the Holocaust?

“In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”

Main goal of Zionism - continued

“It was summed up in the meeting [of the Jewish Agency’s Executive on June 26, 1938] that the Zionist thing to do ‘is belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing…We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts’…Ben-Gurion’s statement at the same meeting: ‘No rationalization can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.’” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”

Main goal of Zionism - continued

“[Ben-Gurion stated] ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second - because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.’ In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that ‘the human conscience’ might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: ‘Zionism is in danger.’” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, “The Seventh Million.”

Main goal of Zionism-continued

"Even David Ben-Gurion’s sympathetic biographer acknowledges that Ben-Gurion did nothing practical for rescue, devoting his energies to post-war prospects. He delegated rescue work to Yitzak Gruenbaum, who [stated]…‘They will say that I am anti-Semitic, that I don’t want to save the Exile, that I don’t have a varm Yiddish hartz…Let them say what they want. I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.’

“Zionists in America…took the same position. At a May 1943 meeting of the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Nahum Goldmann argued, ‘If a drive is opened against the White Paper (the British policy of restricting Jewish immigrants to Palestine) the mass meetings of protest against the murder of European Jewry will have to be dropped. We do not have sufficient manpower for both campaigns.’” Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life.”

Main goal of Zionism - continued

"The Zionist movement…interfered with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian, was at variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them, even when these might be helpful to Jews, even when it was a question of life and death…Beit Zvi documents the Zionist leadership’s indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace except in cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine…[e.g.] the readiness of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand refugees and the sabotaging of this idea - as well as others, like proposals to settle the Jews inAlaska and the Philippines - by the Zionist movement…

“The obtuseness of the Zionist movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not prevent it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole world for its indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or from pressing material, political, and moral demands on the world because of that indifference.” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”

JEWISH CRITICISM OF ZIONISM

Albert Einstein - "‘I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish State. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State,with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain’…
-Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

“The corruption of Judaism, as a religion of universal values, through its politicization by Zionism and by the replacement of dedication to Israel for dedication to God and the moral law, is what has alienated so many young Americans who, searching for spiritual meaning in life, have found little in the organized Jewish community.” Allan Brownfield, “Issues of the American Council for Judaism”, Spring 1997.

“For me, this business called the state of Israel is finished…I can’t bear to see it anymore, the injustice that is done to the Arabs, to the Beduins. All kinds of scum coming from America and as soon as they get off the plane taking over lands in the territories and claiming it for their own…I can’t do anything to change it. I can only go away and let the whole lot go to hell without me.” Israeli actress (and household name) Rivka Mitchell, quoted in Israeli peace movement periodical, “The Other Israel”, August 1998.

"Professor Erich Fromm, a noted Jewish writer and thinker, [stated]…‘In general international law, the principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his rights of citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the Jews. Just because the Arabs fled? Since when is that punishable by confiscation of property, and by being barred from returning to the land on which a people’s forefathers have lived for generations? Thus, the claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territory in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse…I believe that, politically speaking, there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the State towards the Arabs - not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the complete moral obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants of Palestine’…

  • Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

"Nathan Chofshi - ‘Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred…It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the “People of the Book” and the “light of the nations”’…
-Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

http://www.cactus48.com/criticism.html

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
jlesk68 wrote:

The writer of this article and the person that posted it here certainly did with anti-semitic intentions.

If I was anti-semitic I would admit it gentlemen, but I’m not, I agree with Israel’s God given right to exist. I wanted to post something a bit controversial to stir up opinion. I also believe the palestinians have a right to exist.

You post a picture to stir up anger against Jews and you don’t see yourself as anti-semetic?

Why don’t you post pictures of the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bomber killing schoolchildren?

Anti-semetism seems to be awfully popular with the conspiracy theory crowd. Jews control the world and all that other horseshit.

Sometimes I think you are just kidding around when you post this stuff, but the more I see it the more I realize it is all in the same vein.

Perhaps I wouldn’t question your motives if I saw a different side to your postings.[/quote]

We all have seen plenty of palestinian violence on the news inflicted on the jewish people, again, my post was to bring up the other side of the coin that we don’t see.

Regarding my postings, I like to post controversy to fire up opinions, if I posted the same as everybody else then why do it in the first place. Being a christian I’m symphatetic and well aware of the struggles and persecution the jewish people had to deal with not just in the past 60 years but since Old Testament times. A bit of a troublemaker, perhaps, anti-semitic never.

The Rabbi is a very level-headed religious man.

[quote]snipeout wrote:
The only comment there is to say is that this guy states at least 5 times he is a Palestinian SYMPATHIZER. He may be a Jew but he obviously hates his country. Every place you go there are sympathizers for the other side of the coin. How many non-terrorists came out after 9/11 and basically supported the attacks on the United States, just not in those exact words? I work in a jail where some of the people I work with sympathize with the inmates to the point that they make my job more dangerous. Exactly what point were you trying to prove with this? How, although surrounded by countries that want to see them disappear even one of their own wants to see them disappear?[/quote]

He does not consider Israel HIS country. He is also not a Zionist so he is not “one of their own”, as you put it. Read the article.

I think the jews in israel would be better served just to immigrate if possible to the U.S. They are a smart bunch iwould love to have them over.

Why should they have to move? Why can’t the Palestinians stop murdering school children?

As soon as that stops the world can bring pressure on Israel to treat the Palistinians as equals and not second class citizens.

Israel already exists. Israel has as much right to exist as any country.

Israel has to clean up its treatment of the Palestinians, but that cannot happen until the violence starts.

The rest of it is all bullshit.

I’ve been debating whether or not to respond to this thread all day, here are some of my thoughts on this:

I moved to NYC last year for school, after having spent all of my life in the midwest and having no relationships with Jewish people besides a girl I knew in middle school who was one of my best friends (she ended up moving to Conn. after middle school and we lost touch). I have some Jewish friends through school; they are all really cool people. All of them and their Jewish freinds I’ve met are upstanding, decent, down-to-earth people who I have nothing but tremendous respect for. The one thing they have in common is that while they are Jewish, they aren’t religious. Sure they believe in God and go to their temple once in a while, but on the whole they are rational people, like this Rabbi Ahon Cohen. So in my experience has been nothing but positive with secular Jewish people here in NYC.

The religious ones are a different issue. I have never met a group of people so blatantly racist, elitist, stuck-up, etc… These people think it is their God-given right to treat Gentiles (non-Jews) like shit. Their bigotry knows no limits. As soon as you call them out for their bullshit they label you as “anti-semitic”. NYC would be a much better place is these shitheads would pack up and go back to Israel or where-ever they came from. Oh yeah, most Gentile New Yorkers would agree with me on this.

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
battlelust wrote:
So Rabbi Cohen advocates a secular and democratic state in place of the race-based state of Israel on religious and humanitarian grounds and he is thus an anti-Semite?!

Maybe we need to review what ‘semite’ means. Here’s dictionary.com’s definition:

A member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near East and northern Africa, including the Arabs, Arameans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians.
A Jew.
Bible. A descendant of Shem

The racist apologists for Zionism love to play the ‘anti-semite’ card when refering to Arab hostility to the apartheid state of Israel…but it just doesn’t make any sense! This, however, is a new and fantastic expansion of ‘anti-semite;’ apparently, Orthodox Jewish rabbis can now qualify as ‘anti-semites’ by disagreeing with political Zionists!

I am going with the definition of “a Jew”. Yes Arabs and others are semetic, but that is not germane to my point.

This so called Rabbi is a nut job. He is on the far fringe.

I consider anyone that does not think Israel has a right to exist an anti-semite.

There are a lot of anti-semites that don’t think Israel should exist. Europe is full of them.

They did not stand up to stop the “final solution”. In fact many willingly joined in. Many others claimed to not know what was going on under their very noses.

After the war many Jews returned to their homeland and carved out a state.

They displaced some Palestineans. Rather than take in displaced Palistineans the billion or so Muslims have used them as tool against the Jews, thus making the Palestineans miserable.

The writer of this article and the person that posted it here certainly did with anti-semitic intentions.

If you cannot see those intentions, perhaps you are seeing through a filter.

I am no apologist for Isreal. They have played dirty with the Palestineans (as have the Arabs) and they have played dirty with the US.

I do recognize anti-semitism.[/quote]

Well said Zap!

Exactly right zap, except for one thing : its all easy said than done. Whats easier/better: propping up a country w/ enemies all around it while knowing full well that there will be thousands of deaths on both sides of the fence every year or saying to a group of over-achievers that they should emigrate ?

[quote]thabigdon24 wrote:
Exactly right zap, except for one thing : its all easy said than done. Whats easier/better: propping up a country w/ enemies all around it while knowing full well that there will be thousands of deaths on both sides of the fence every year or saying to a group of over-achievers that they should emigrate ?

[/quote]

They don’t want to emigrate. One of the most recent instances of groups of Jews being forced to emigrate approximately 6 million of them were murdered.

This is a tough situation with no easy answers. Allowing Israel to be wiped out is unacceptable.

Zap: that is the most absurd reference to the holocaust that i can think of. The Jews wanted to go to their homeland but the fact of the matter is that it is just too unsafe. Lots of them are moving out already, and ethnic palestenians have kids at almost twice the rate of the jews in israel, so sooner or later they will be forced to give up a lot of land to the palestenians - they need to negotiate sooner than later. I wish they would just leave all of this mess and come to a country that actually wants them. If we didnt have any jews we wouldnt really have the Bronx or an entertainment industry. Why shouldnt they come to a country that wants them ?

[quote]thabigdon24 wrote:
Zap: that is the most absurd reference to the holocaust that i can think of. The Jews wanted to go to their homeland but the fact of the matter is that it is just too unsafe. Lots of them are moving out already, and ethnic palestenians have kids at almost twice the rate of the jews in israel, so sooner or later they will be forced to give up a lot of land to the palestenians - they need to negotiate sooner than later. I wish they would just leave all of this mess and come to a country that actually wants them. If we didnt have any jews we wouldnt really have the Bronx or an entertainment industry. Why shouldnt they come to a country that wants them ?[/quote]

Because they don’t want to.