Groucho Marxism

On Thursday this week, two Jewish people were killed and three left in a serious condition after a car ramming and stabbing attack outside a synagogue in Manchester.  The attack occurred during worship on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar. As I write this details of exactly what happened are still emerging, but it seems that one of the people killed was hit with police gunfire, as was one of those seriously injured. The incident represents the worst antisemitic attack to have occurred on British soil for many years. The motivations of the attacker are not currently known, but it is all but certain that they were related to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. This once again highlights the importance of maintaining a clear separation between Judaism and Zionism.

Something that makes maintaining such a separation more difficult than it should be is that the majority of Jews are supportive of Zionism and of Israel. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an independent institute that specialises in researching the state of contemporary Jewish communities in the UK, 65% of British Jews identify as Zionist, and 77% feel a sense of attachment to Israel. It should be noted at this point that even if these figures were 100%, it would still be perfectly legitimate to criticise both Zionism and Israel. There was probably a time when a majority of Germans would have identified as Nazi and would have felt a sense of attachment to the Third Reich, but criticising Nazism and the German state at that time would obviously not have made you a Germanophobe.

Much as we might wonder today how an entire nation embraced the poisonous, genocidal ideology of Nazism, we may wonder how an entire religion – or at least, the majority of its adherents – has embraced the poisonous, genocidal ideology of Zionism. The obvious explanation that there is something about Judaism which naturally fosters this kind of ideology must be dismissed, for two reasons: first, because Judaism was around for thousands of years before the advent of Zionism; and second, because similarly poisonous ideologies have developed many times throughout human history that had nothing to do with Judaism. Clearly, human beings have an unfortunate propensity for succumbing to these kinds of ideas.

A better explanation is that Jews are indoctrinated into Zionism from an early age. There is quite a lot of evidence for this. Take, for example, Habonim Dror, the Jewish Zionist youth movement formed in 1982, which has branches in several English-speaking countries and boasts alumni such as ‘comedians’ David Baddiel and Sacha Baron Cohen,  ‘journalist’ Jonathan Freedland, and génocidaire Mark Regev. One of Habonim Dror’s key principles, ‘Jewish Peoplehood’, is based on the idea that ‘Israel is the central physical, cultural and spiritual space for the Jewish people that demands full participation from Diasporic Jewish communities in shaping its future.’ Habonim Dror claims to be progressive and socialist; but socialism is fundamentally incompatible with a racist ideology like Zionism.

Organisations like Habonim Dror, innocuous as they may seem at first glance, effectively play the same role in manufacturing consent for Zionism that the Hitler Youth played in manufacturing consent for Nazism (it is surely no coincidence that the Nazi’s also referred to themselves as ‘socialist’). Still, the fact that Jews are indoctrinated into Zionism from an early age is does not completely explain their support for Zionism, as it does not explain why this indoctrination is carried out. To understand the reason for that, I think we need to go all the way back to the Holocaust. It is often said that the Holocaust was a singular evil, and I agree. There have been many genocides before and some since (including in Gaza); but none have matched the Holocaust either in terms of the scale or the manner of the killing.

The Holocaust resulted in around 6 million deaths, more than any other genocide in history, of whom the vast majority were Jews. The overall death toll is bad enough on its own, but seems even worse when you consider that it represented over a third of the worldwide Jewish population in at the start of the war, and around two thirds of the European Jewish population. Before WWII there around 9 million Yiddish speakers living in Central Europe; today, the language is all but extinct. An entire culture was effectively wiped out. Adding to that the deliberate, mechanized nature of the killing, and the fact that this all happened within living memory, it is hardly any wonder that many Jews today are still traumatized by this event, even if the number who actually lived though it is becoming vanishingly small.

You might think that, having been victims of genocide themselves, Jews of all people would be reluctant to inflict such suffering on others. But I think that would be naive. Instead, I think we are witnessing an example of transgenerational trauma: the psychological effect that trauma experienced by a group of people has on subsequent generations in that group. It is well known that trauma is often passed down in families from one generation to the next, with the victim inflicting similar trauma on their own children. It seems to me that something similar is going on here, only on a much larger scale. The question, then, is: how do we break this cycle? Because unless we find a way to break the cycle of trauma and violence, it seems destined to continue.