The (Attempted) Silencing of Tim Anderson

The following article, by Jeremy Salt, was originally published at the American Herald Tribune: 

To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of AD 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots,’ their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world, they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and Zion. [1]

The Blumenfelds were here on Friday; I disagreed violently with him about Zionism, which he defends and praises, which I call betrayal and Hitlerism. [2]

The usual conversations for and against Zionism, which I equate with Hitlerism. [3]

These comments are taken not from the diary of Tim Anderson, whose employment at the University of Sydney has been terminated over a graphic he showed his class of a swastika stamped over the Israeli flag, but from the wartime diary, kept from 1933-1945, by Victor Klemperer, cousin of the famous conductor Otto, son of a rabbi, baptised as a Protestant, but suffering from the same cruelty and sadism as all other German Jews because he was regarded as ‘ethnically Jewish.’

The comparisons Klemperer could make in the 1930s cannot be made by a Sydney university lecturer in 2018, following the sacking of Tim Anderson by the Acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Stephen Garton.

For Jews, the swastika was the symbol of unrelenting evil. Palestinians bombed and shelled by Israeli tanks and planes emblazoned with the Star of David may well feel the same about this hijacked Jewish symbol. Who is doing greater damage to this symbol, Tim Anderson or the state of Israel?

Zionism and Nazism are linked at many levels. In the 1930s, through the Ha’avara (Crossing or Transfer) agreement signed between the Nazi government and the Zionist Federation of Germany, Jews could travel to Palestine – and only to Palestine – as long as they purchased German goods that could be exported with them. Through this means, about 60,000 German Jews were able to pay their way out.

Ideologically, an Aryan German state and an exclusive Jewish national state were the mirror images of each other, with German Zionists and not just the Nazis talking about purity of race and the danger of mixed marriages. The Nazi government did not want Jews in Germany and the Zionists did not want them to be there. Palestine was their solution to a common problem.

Adolf Eichmann’s visit to Palestine in 1937, most probably to inspect Zionist colonies, was very short because the British allowed him to stay only one night. The SS officer, Baron von Mildenstein, however, stayed for six months, writing glowing articles about Zionism and the ‘new Jew’ for the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (The Assault). His visit was commemorated by Goebbels with the striking of a medal showing the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.

While Haa’vara was a pragmatic and ideological arrangement that suited both sides, the approaches the ‘extreme’ Irgun group made to the Nazis was purely ideological. The Irgun wanted to establish the same kind of national-racial Jewish state in Palestine as the national-racial Aryan state the Nazis were creating in Germany and they approached the Nazis accordingly.

Lenni Brenner has covered all the details in his two books, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. Francis Nicosia has written on the Zionist-Nazi connection in his 1980s book, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. In Italy, Mussolini provided the Irgun with training facilities for four years at the Civitavecchia naval base.

In conversation with a rabbi Mussolini once described Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founding father of ‘Revisionist’ Zionism and the guiding light of the Irgun, as ‘your fascist.’ The Zionists also cooperated with the Nazis in occupied Hungary.

These dealings between the Nazis and both mainstream and ‘extreme’ Zionism were initiated at a time of a global Jewish economic boycott of Germany and have since been seen by many non-Zionist Jews as betrayal.

Benzion Netanyahu was for a time Jabotinsky’s personal secretary. Jabotinsky wrote of building an ‘iron wall’ against the Palestinians. Of its nature Zionism is extreme, so Jabotinsky’s ‘revisionism’ was simply more extreme or perhaps, better put, more open and less hypocritical about its aims, intentions and methods than the mainstream.

The Irgun and Stern Gang terrorist organizations were revisionists and two Israeli Prime Ministers, Menachem Begin (1977-1983) and Yitzhak Shamir (1983-4 and 1986-90 and 1990-92), were Irgunists. They came into office as terrorists and had committed even greater crimes by the time they left it. The sly and duplicitous Benyamin Netanyahu, the son of Benzion, has faithfully followed in their violent footsteps.

As human beings we make comparisons all the time. It is natural to look into history for parallels with Zionism. Algeria under French rule and apartheid South Africa quickly spring to mind. In both countries, the atrocities committed against the indigenous people over a long period of time were shocking but still not on the same scale as the massacres and dispossession of the Palestinians.

Historically, ideologically and in the racism and criminality of the Israeli state, Zionism is comparable with Nazism, whether the Zionists like it or not (and of course there is nothing they hate more). Palestinians suffer from institutional, structural, incidental and casual racism and violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers, police and the civilian population. The wellspring of these crimes is an ideology which reduces Palestinians to second-class human beings, and in the minds of some Zionists, not humans at all but insects.

Snipers along the Gaza fence who have killed hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded tens of thousands more congratulate each other on their sharp shooting and are congratulated by their politicians. Massacres from the air and the ground evoke not a quiver of conscience in Israel’s leadership, which, along with many if not the majority of Jewish Israelis, regards every Palestinian as the enemy and an actual or potential ‘terrorist’ whose killing is justified whatever the circumstances, whatever the means and whatever the age of the victim.

Violent West Bank settlers are protected by soldiers and police, whatever the crimes they commit. Hebron is one of the most racist patches of earth on the planet. What goes on there was once described by the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy as a Jewish settler pogrom against the Palestinians but whereas pogroms under Russian rule in the Pale of Settlement were short-term attacks, the Hebron pogrom has been a continual process since 1967, just as the Nakba has been continual since 1948.

Two communities in hostage, one to the Nazis and one to the Zionists. A spokesman for the University of Sydney described Tim Anderson’s montage as ‘disrespectful and offensive.’ How much more disrespectful and offensive is the state of Israel?

Tim Anderson is not allowed to say or depict what he thinks. Others are, as long as they belittle him, and as long as they support the packs of terrorists – their ‘rebels’ – who have torn Syria to pieces at the behest of the governments that have armed and financed them and attacked the Syrian military on their behalf.

The Australian media has never reported Palestine truthfully. It repeated the lies told over Iraq and Libya and for the past eight years it has carried on this ignoble tradition by feeding misinformation, disinformation and lies over Syria into the Australian cultural mainstream. Except in its own mind, it is the purveyor not of ‘news’ but propaganda, packaged and presented on behalf of the Australian government and its distant masters.

Tim Anderson has tried to tell the truth, the way he sees it. The more vulpine elements in the media have relished his downfall. They hate him because his truths threaten the false narrative they have been spinning on behalf of the governments, including the Australian government, who are fully complicit in the war on Syria.

Ultimately, though, it was not Anderson’s defense of the right of the Syrian people to defend themselves that led to the termination of his employment, it was his view, shared with Victor Klemperer and many Jews since his time, that Zionism and Nazism have much in common.

Tim Anderson has been under attack for years. Now Stephen Garton has brought down the hatchet. He has no known specialized knowledge of the Middle East. There is not the slightest doubt that he has come under heavy pressure from the Zionist lobby, the defender of a violent, racist, criminal state, to shut Tim Anderson up. Anderson has even been banned from walking into his own campus.

Garton is in no position to judge whether there is any basis for comparing Zionism to Nazi racism yet he has passed arbitrary judgment. Other academics have rallied to Tim Anderson’s defense so this is a battle which the Zionists and Stephen Garton may yet lose.

Even though his life was in danger, Victor Klemperer refused to go to Palestine. He knew what the Zionists were up to. They were going to take Palestine from its people and he wanted no part of it. Zionism was a doctrine, which as a man of conscience even in the most trying conditions, he despised.

Yet what this son of a rabbi wrote in his diaries in the 1930s cannot be said, or implied, by the superimposition of a swastika over the flag of Israel, in an Australian university in 2018.

Endnotes

[1] Victor Klemperer, The Klemperer Diaries 1933-1945 (London: Phoenix Press, London, 2000), June 13, 1934, p.66. 
[2] April 22, 1935, p. 113
[3] May 26, 1940, p.326.

Jeremy Salt has taught at the University of Melbourne, Bosporus University (Istanbul) and Bilkent University (Ankara), specialising in the modern history of the Middle East.  His most recent book is “The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.)